I kept getting dinner wrong in one of two ways.

The problem was never information

Knowing that Greek yogurt has more protein than sour cream is not the hard part. The hard part is standing over a recipe you actually want to eat, on a Tuesday, working out what changes if you swap one for the other and whether the dish survives it.

I did that in my head for years. Sometimes I got it right. Often I made something that technically fit the target and tasted like it had been designed by a spreadsheet.

My fiancée cooks the same way, adjusting recipes to whatever we are aiming at that month. She is the reason the app has to work for someone who does not want to think about nutrition at all, only about dinner. If a feature needs explaining to her, it is wrong.

Why not just use a calorie tracker

I tried. They are built around a different question. A tracker wants to know what you ate, after you ate it, so it can total up the day. That is a diary, and it puts the work at the wrong end.

What I needed was the number before I cooked, attached to the recipe, at the moment I could still do something about it. Recipe first, macros second. Not a food log with a recipe feature bolted on.

So ReciPop never asks what you ate. There is no diary, no streak to protect, and no guilt when a number moves. It shows you what a dish contains and then gets out of the way.

What I actually wanted

• Save a recipe from anywhere, without retyping it or screenshotting it.
• See the macros per serving without entering a single ingredient by hand.
• Ask for a higher-protein version and be told what the swap costs, before committing.
• Keep everything in one place, because the recipes I lose are the ones I never saved.

That last one matters more than it sounds. The failure mode is not a bad recipe, it is a good one you cannot find again.

How the numbers here are worked out

Every macro figure on this site and in the app is an estimate, calculated from typical values for the ingredients rather than measured in a laboratory. They are labelled as estimates everywhere they appear, and rounded rather than dressed up with false precision.

Being a nutritionist is precisely why I am strict about this. A number that looks exact and is not does more harm than a number that admits its error bars. The swap figures come from ReciPop's own swap table, and each one is the typical per-serving effect of that substitution. The direction is reliable even when the exact figure is not.

How the guides are researched

Search demand is checked with a keyword tool before anything is written, and the figure is recorded alongside its source and the date. No number on this site is a guess. Where a page recommends a substitute, it also says where that substitute fails, including the cases where ReciPop's own swap is the wrong choice. If Greek yogurt will split in your pan, the page says so.

What that means if you cook here too

You do not need to care about any of this to use the app. That is rather the point. But it does change a few things you will notice.

• You get the number before you cook, not a log to fill in afterwards. Nothing to remember, nothing to catch up on when you miss a day.
• When a swap is a bad idea, the page says so. Greek yogurt splits in a hot pan. Avocado is not lighter than mayonnaise. You will read that here rather than find out over dinner.
• No number is dressed up. Estimates are labelled as estimates and rounded, because a figure that looks exact and is not will cost you more than one that admits what it is.
• Nothing here is written for a search engine first. If a topic cannot be answered honestly, it does not get a page.

The company

ReciPop is operated by Chronica Labs Ltd, 10 Kings Court, Uxbridge Rd, TW15 6DG, United Kingdom. Our privacy policy and terms of use set out the rest.