Enhanced recipes management

Marnu

Hi, can you add features to make cronOmeter work more like other recipe managers?

• Add an Instructions field for cooking instructions
• Add a Shopping list that will total the ingredients for the recipes added to it
• Add a "Cooking" view that full screen the recipe & Instructions while cooking

Thank you for a great product!

HLSTEW

Also importing from websites would be good. I think some of the other apps let you past the recipe URL in and if it has the correct formatting for the recipe, it can import.

talkingmountain

I would love to be able to import recipes from Paprika and Evernote so that Cronometer could calculate the nutrients for me and use the data to add to my intake.

WellFed

@talkingmountain I also have Paprika and really appreciate how easy and fun it is to use. Creating recipes in Cronometer is time consuming, and I'm afraid I'm starting to burn out. I rarely eat packaged foods so this would be extremely valuable to me. It would also encourage a whole food diet, which everyone agrees is optimal for good health.

petchef

Same here. I eat very few packaged foods, love to cook and have all my recipes in Copy Me That or Evernote. Retyping everything is daunting, so I've stopped using cronometer and decided to not purchase the ad free version.

Hilary

Sad to hear you are leaving @petchef . While we do not sync with a recipe management program currently, Cronometer is constantly evolving.
There are a couple of ways to create recipes in Cronometer. If you have entered the ingredients in your diary previously, you can create a recipe directly from your diary by multiselecting the ingredients the right clicking to select "Create recipe from selected items". You can also create recipes using the recipe editor. You should have to be typing anything out as you can just select the ingredients to add to your recipe and then set the serving size. I understand that it's a lot of work on the outset, but once the recipes are there they will be easy to access via our new search tabs under "Custom".

Hilary

@Marnu , Sorry I missed your post earlier!
You can enter your instructions for cooking in the "Notes" Section of the recipe editor. You can also select "Display for Printing" to see a larger view of your recipe with a complete notes section so you can see your directions you have written out here (Or copy and pasted from another recipe editor program.
While we don't have a shopping list feature, I'd suggest adding your recipes you would like to shop for to your diary list, hit "Explode recipe" for each one, and then in Trends,
select "Full report" (For Gold users only), Select "Daily Diary" only and then print the report. You can use this as your shopping list.

As we are not primarily a recipe management app, these features are not prioritized as much as nutrient detail and fitness tracking requests, but know that we have taken recipe management features under advisement and there may be updates in the future.

mfox

I would like the ability to move ingredients up or down on the list

Serving measure should allow for gram units, not just servings per recipe

Hilary

hello @mfox ,
We do not have the option to move ingredients around in the list in the recipe editor, however if you enter a recipe in to your diary, you can explode the recipe and move them around in your diary.
There is a drop down menu to change the serving size to be gram based when you are creating a recipe if your ingredients all contain gram amounts. Be sure when entering ingredients in to a recipe that you are using entries with the best nutrition data. These are most likely NCCDB or USDA entries and will contain gram amount serving sizes. If there is no gram amount listed for an ingredient, it is then impossible to calculate a total gram amount for a recipe.

mfox

@Hilary -- thanks for clearing up why I was sometimes able to get gram units for my recipes and sometimes not -- makes prefect sense and I can work with this.
Also thanks for the workaround for moving items listed in the recipes. This will be very useful when creating new recipes based off of previous recipes.

CeeJay

Just adding my hope for a recipe importer in the the near future. It's the only reason I can't fully give up MyFitnessPal. Being able to copy/paste a formatted recipe or website link would make this app near perfect for me.

Bob_McBob

It would make a huge difference to me if I could add individual ingredient preparation notes when creating recipes. Things like whether onions should be chopped or sliced, or which specific type of onion. Once I add a recipe on Cronometer I reference it for convenience rather than the original source, and it's extremely irritating having to review the tiny notes box to figure out how to prepare each ingredient. I also really don't understand why ingredient order can't be changed.

I tend to use the app when I'm grocery shopping, and it's very annoying how much it hides ingredients for recipes, and even when "editing" a recipe (the only option to view ingredients) how it doesn't really scroll properly on Android.

I do understand that Cronometer isn't primarily a recipe management service, but given the attention paid to accuracy and precision in all other aspects of nutrition on the site and app, making it easy to accurately follow saved recipes seems like an obvious feature.

Hilary

Hi @Bob_McBob ,

You're right, this isn't a huge priority for us, but it is definitely something I can see us focusing on in the future for ease of use, and expanding our scope! We have some big changes to Cronometer coming soon; our programmers are hard at work on these updates, but I will keep your suggestions in mind for the future!
We are always looking to make the app more user friendly, so suggestions from our users are imperative!

For now, have you tried using our 'explode recipe' feature? Add the recipe to your diary, then choose 'explode recipe' from the settings menu either by right clicking on the diary entry in the web or swiping it to the right on mobile. Once you have exploded the recipe, you can easily drag and drop the ingredients to move them around, or adjust serving sizes of each ingredient, or add/delete ingredients. Once you have completed editing the items here, multiselect all the ingredients, and then choose 'Create recipe from selected items' from the right click menu.

Rod

I am hoping that one can import Vitamix recipes in the future!

cronon

I would be delighted about a possibility to import whole recipes from webpages or Paprika as well. Currently, I'm really struggling to even start tracking my food, because it would be such a time consuming activity and I'm sure I won't do it consistently.

Maybe it could be a more general mechanism, where one enters plain text into a text field including both ingredients and measurements, that text is parsed by Cronometer, one is presented with the parsed result to correct potential parsing errors, and then finally logs the whole recipe.

Also I wonder whether an API for Cronometer exists?!

ccolburn

This thread is over 3 years old. I just signed up for one year subscription to Cronometer because I am worn out on using MyFitnessPal but the lack of ability to import recipes means I will have to get a refund for my subscription and go back to MFP. It is impossible to spend that much time every day entering foods. Not to mention some very common items are not in the food database (very surprising and incredibly disappointing for a for-fee service)

ccolburn

Sad, no response to comments. Cronometer is happy to take the subscription revenue but not to respond to a simple request (recipe import) that exists on ALL of its main competitors. Note to developers of Cronometer - ease of use is a HUGE motivating factor for users. Lack of recipe import is a major miss for this platform.

CeeJay

https://forums.cronometer.com/discussion/comment/14178#Comment_14178

it’s truly frustrating and disrespectful that we can’t get a simple update. It’s been YEARS and everyday I’m getting notifications about people requesting this feature.

Karen_Cronometer

Hi there @ccolburn and @CeeJay Sorry about that, there was no disrespect intended!

We can be reached at support@cronometer.com to speak with our team directly. We are always happy to hear your feedback

The update is: we are kicking the tires on a recipe import feature! Internal testing is not complete, but this feature is on the horizon!

ARG

Yeah, I have hundreds of Paprika recipes. Add me to the list.

sulforaphanatic

Please finish the recipe importer soon! I just bought Gold assuming it was a feature (because MyFitnessPal has it), and I'm really disappointed that there isn't one in the release build of the app and website. I'm ok having paid the $40 to support the development of such a feature, because I have disposable income and believe in Cronometer, but I think I'll find it rather hard to renew my membership next year unless the recipe importer is finished (i.e. out of beta).

Btw, @Karen_Cronometer it's been six months, can we get an update on the tire kicking of this feature? I see that it's available in the beta, which I'm very grateful for (and signing up for now). But do you have any idea when it'll be somewhat stable/pre-release quality?

Karen_Cronometer

We've come a loooong way since that first iteration! Our recipe importer is looking very good!

We decided we wanted to put more work into building a recipe importer to be much better at matching high quality foods (meaning foods with more nutrition information) and get a high percentage of matched ingredients and serving sizes rather than trying to match brand name products with little nutrition data.

We have been training the software to learn how to better match ingredients from recipes our beta-testers have been creating and it will continue to learn from users once it is released to all Gold users. This means the current version of the recipe importer will continue to get better at matching ingredients with user input.

We have also been improving the UI. It's easy to replace an ingredient if you'd like to make a substitution, or to search for an ingredient Cronometer was not able to find or define the serving size for. We show the original ingredient and serving size when you search for a suitable replacement.

While we can't provide release dates for features, we appreciate your support! You won't be disappointed that you went Gold!