The Good
- Free
- Excellent recipes
- Search by ingredients you have on hand
The Bad
- Ingredients and instructions on separate pages
- Shopping list repeats items
For a free recipe app, Whole Foods Market Recipes (Free) includes a good amount of content. The app has a solid collection of recipes, and features like a shopping list and the ability to search by ingredients you already have on hand make the Whole Foods app a winner.
Read More: Top 14 iPhone Recipe Apps
Great app for vegetarians or other special diets
Whole Foods did a nice job with this recipe app, especially the interface. It’s nice to look at and easy to browse, and it was very speedy over a WiFi connection. The app description doesn’t say how many recipes the app includes, but let’s just say that there are more than I wanted to count. You can search for recipes by course, category, keyword, or special diets like vegan or wheat-free. On the search results page, each app is illustrated with a picture (if available) and several icons. These icons tell you at a glance if the recipe is vegetarian, vegan, wheat-free, low-sodium, low-fat, gluten-free, etc.
Each recipe can be saved to your favorites, added to a shopping list, or emailed. Sadly, there’s no Twitter or Facebook integration. Nutrition facts are also included for each recipe, including the total calorie count, fat, carbohydrates, etc. My only beef with the recipes themselves is that the ingredient totals and instructions are on separate pages -- a problem I ran into with Pocket Cocktails recipe app as well. It’s not a huge deal, but you’ll have to move back and forth between the two pages when following a recipe. (Jamie Oliver's 20 Minute Meals is one recipe app that got it right by putting that info on the same page -- genius!)
Search by ingredients you have on hand
One of my favorite parts of the Whole Foods Recipes app is the "On Hand" tab. In this area, you can find recipes based on the ingredients you already have. Enter up to three ingredients and the app does the rest. Few recipe apps have this feature and they really should -- I use it all the time. It’s super useful for those nights when you have a few food items to use up and can’t decide what to do with them. There are a few limitations though. The app searches the recipe ingredients list, so it can make some mistakes -- like the time my search for recipes with chicken and bacon came up with baked beans that use chicken broth.
The shopping list isn’t quite as useful as it could be because it doesn’t consolidate ingredients, so you’ll see some items twice or even three times, depending on the recipes you’ve added. You can manually edit the list to delete duplicate items, but it would be nice if the Whole Foods Recipe app did that for you. The shopping list can be emailed, which is a nice touch. Since this app comes from a grocery store, there is the obligatory store finder as well.
The Bottom Line
Even though it has a few downsides, I find myself using the Whole Foods Recipes app quite a lot. Part of that is due to the excellent recipes, since I always seem to find something good to make. The "On Hand" tab is also a top feature and shows that someone put a lot of thought into this app. The recipes would be easier to follow if the instructions and ingredients were on the same page, but otherwise the Whole Foods app impresses. Overall rating: 4.5 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Whole Foods app works with the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.