Tired of browsing recipes instead of just eating your week?

What Samsung Food does well

The recipe library is genuinely large: the App Store listing advertises over 240,000 public recipes, and the app's headline feature lets you capture a recipe from almost any web page, blog, Instagram post or even a handwritten card into one standard format.

The free tier is not a stripped-down demo: recipe saving, basic meal planning and, since a recent update, calorie tracking are all available without paying. For anyone who owns Samsung kitchen appliances, the app also drives step-by-step connected cooking on compatible ovens and fridges through SmartThings.

It has broad satisfaction behind it too: a 4.8-out-of-5 rating from roughly 6,400 ratings on the US App Store as of the date read.

Who Samsung Food is for

It suits someone who already enjoys collecting recipes — from cooking accounts, food blogs, or a family member's handwritten notes — and wants one place to keep them instead of forty browser tabs and a stack of index cards.

It also suits Samsung kitchen owners who want their compatible oven or fridge to walk them through a recipe step by step, since that connected-cooking layer is a feature Samsung is specifically building the app around.

It is a weaker fit if what you actually want each Sunday is not a bigger recipe collection, but a finished week: dishes already chosen, a grocery list already built, and a number that tells you roughly what it will cost.

Where it stops — the complaints

Several reviewers flag that the Chrome extension, inherited from the Whisk rebrand, is broken: one review describes “a loading circle that makes the extension completely unusable.”

Edits do not always stick. One review roundup reports that “edited recipe instructions don't save” and that “serving size changes don't carry over to shopping lists” — exactly the kind of friction that undermines a shopping-list feature.

Support is described as slow to respond, with one Chrome Web Store review summarising it as a “bug coupled with a good-for-nothing support team.”

Since the Samsung takeover, users also report heavier monetization — ads and users being “prompted for an immediate upsell” before they had tried the free product — plus recipes auto-labelled “good or bad” in language one reviewer called “seeped in fat phobia and diet culture.”

What Macro Recipe does the same

You still get real dishes, not a list of nutrients: a weekly menu built from actual recipes, with a single grocery list that adds quantities up across the week so you buy one bag of rice, not three separate lines.

Dietary rules — vegetarian, halal, pork-free, allergies, ingredients you never want to see — are applied to your profile once, the same idea as filtering a recipe collection, except it happens automatically to what you are served.

When it is time to cook, each recipe opens step by step, and a batch cooking mode groups a week's preparation into one session if you prefer to cook once and eat several times.

What it does differently

Macro Recipe does not start from a library you browse. You tell it your goal — lose weight, maintain, or build muscle — your diet and your kitchen, and it hands you the finished week: dishes, portions and a grocery list, already assembled, with no scrolling through thousands of recipes to find seven that fit together.

The grocery list comes with an estimated cost in your own currency, adjusted for your country's price level. You set a weekly grocery budget, the menu is built with it in mind, and the app tells you when a week runs over — it is an estimate, not a till receipt, but it is a number Samsung Food's recipe library does not give you.

Portions are adjusted so the day lands near your estimated calorie and protein targets, and when a day falls short the app says so rather than pretending. If you do not care about the numbers, you can ignore them and simply cook.

What it does not do

It is not a recipe-discovery or recipe-saving tool. There is no 240,000-recipe library to browse, no Chrome extension, and no feature that captures a recipe from a random web page or Instagram post — Macro Recipe writes and adapts its own recipes to your goal instead.

It has no connected-appliance integration: no SmartThings link, no step-by-step guidance sent to an oven or fridge. If that is the reason you would pick Samsung Food, this is not a substitute for it.

It is not free. Your first menu is free and there is a 3-day trial, after which Macro Recipe is a paid subscription. It is on iPhone today.

Switching in practice

There is nothing to import: Macro Recipe does not pull in Samsung Food's saved recipes, and you should be wary of any app that claims it can. What is worth carrying over by hand is your list of dislikes, allergies and the handful of dishes you know you would miss — plug those into your Macro Recipe profile once.

A first week looks like this: set your goal, your diet and your grocery budget, and you get a menu with a matching grocery list before you have browsed a single recipe. Cook from it as normal, swap anything you do not fancy, and let the list update.

Keep Samsung Food installed if what you value there is the recipe collection or the connected-oven feature — the two apps solve different problems, and there is no reason you cannot use both.

Price, compared honestly

Samsung Food's paid tier, Samsung Food+, is listed at $6.99 per month or $59.99 per year with a 7-day free trial; pricing is said to vary by country through the App Store or Play Store's local conversion. The free tier includes recipe saving, planning and calorie tracking.

Macro Recipe's first weekly menu is free, followed by a 3-day trial, after which it is a paid subscription. Both prices are estimates of what you will actually pay in your own store — check the listing for the exact figure in your country before you decide.

What three days of a weekly menu look like

An indicative example for someone aiming at roughly 1,800 kcal and 120 g of protein a day. Estimated figures; your own menu is built from your profile, your tastes and your budget.

Frequently asked questions