Pepperplate for Recipe Management, Food Shopping, Meal Planning

Pepperplate (free) has a website and mobile apps for planning meals, storing recipes, and creating shopping lists.

One website and app that I've been fiddling with lately for recipe management, food shopping lists, and meal planning is Pepperplate (free). It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. Use is limited on smartphones, but I actually think it works reasonably well on the iPad, save for a few inefficiencies in design.


The site and apps let you create recipes or import them from a number of other websites, including Recipe.com, Smitten Kitchen, Health.com, Bon Appetit, Food Network, Real Simple, Taste.com.au, Food Network, and a bunch of others. I like that it imports a photo with the recipe, too. One of the inefficiencies is that you have to copy and paste the recipe's URL into the browser. I'd like to see something automated, maybe similar to what Pinterest does, which is give you a bookmark for your browser that does the copy and paste work for you. With Pinterest, when you install and then select the "Pin it" bookmark browser anytime you find a site with an image you want to save, it automatically does the work for you.

I really like that Pepperplate has calendaring, though I'm not crazy about how it operates. Calendaring lets you put recipes onto a calendar so that you can plan your meals. As I've been using it, though, I've found it doesn't work smoothly. Sometimes I try to drag a recipe from one position to another without success. Sometimes I push a button and nothing happens. So, there's work to be done there, but I like the concept.

Lastly, for any recipe, you can generate a shopping list. This feature makes the smartphone mobile apps much more worth having than the others. Pepperplate will add all the ingredients to your shopping list, and if you have something in your pantry already, you can just X off to remove it. A feature I'd suggest: Add a space called "Pantry" or some such, where I can tell Pepperplate, "Look, I always have salt, pepper, olive oil, chicken stock, onions, and garlic. When those ingredients appear on a recipe, exclude them from the shopping list."