Yummly is an app that draws from the internet’s wealth of recipes, as well as the company’s own signature recipes and video content, to deliver instructions and suggestions for cooking enthusiasts. It also incorporates useful features, such as a produce scanner for recipe ideas, Instacart integration, and a meal planner to schedule meals throughout the month. Unfortunately, Yummly’s numerous issues, including the inability to edit recipes, the absence of a digital pantry, and poor grocery data consolidation, prevent it from reaching the heights offered by Paprika, our Editors’ Choice pick for meal planning apps.

Getting Started With Yummly

Yummly is available for free on the web, Android, and iOS. When you first load Yummly, you’re prompted to create an account using an email address, or Google or Facebook credentials. After this, you’re guided through a questionnaire to determine your dietary preferences, favorite ethnic foods, cooking experience, and allergies. Yummly is a recommendation service, so the information you enter helps the app suggest recipes as you peruse its many categories.

Once you’ve made your selections, Yummly takes you to its subscription page. Yummly is fairly aggressive with its subscription pushing. A premium plan costs $5 per month, or $2.50 per month with an annual subscription. Subscribing expands Yummly’s offerings to include meal planning, scheduling, smart searching tools, and exclusive recipes and videos. Without this, you’re limited to recipe suggestions, searches, and Yummly’s “Seconds” video series (more on that in a bit). You get a free, one-month trial when you subscribe, which is a fine way to test the app before committing to a subscription. Unfortunately, this requires that you have a valid credit card; you cannot enjoy the free trial without one.
Yummly doesn’t serve ads to free users, which is a plus. On the other hand, the subscription tier has features that should be included in the free version by default (nutritional information and meal-planning tools).

Spending $5 per month wont break the bank, but Paprika Recipe Manager, the PCMag Editors’ Choice pick for cooking apps, is a one-time, $4.99 purchase. Paprika lacks video content and other cool features that Yummly possesses, but makes up for it with an intuitive meal-planning calendar and excellent pantry-management system that’s a must for any cook.

A World of Food

You search for recipes using the three categories: Just For You, Explore, and Pro (Yummly’s subscription-only video content tier that free users cannot access).

Yummly’s graphical user interface is great. Big, bold recipe images take up the bulk of the screen, with the recipe’s name, its source blog or website, and a like button displayed at the bottom of each food card. Clicking a recipe expands the image card to fit the entire screen, and adds more information (star rating, ingredient count, calories per serving, and prep time).
Scrolling down a selected recipe card brings up the ingredient list, a handy shopping cart for ordering groceries online via Instacart or Walmart. There’s also an Add to Meal Plan button to schedule the recipe for a later time. Swiping left and right shows the total calorie count, sodium, fat, carbs, and other valuable information (these are unavailable to free users). Below the nutrition facts are the recipe’s user reviews, as well as related recipes. Meal planning is also fairly convenient, letting you schedule a cooking reminder to push notifications through your phone about when to start cooking. Paprika taps your phone’s Calendar app to do this, so it’s nice that Yummly incorporates this function into the app itself.

If a recipe is one of Yummly’s own, you can click the “Make It” button to get directions. However, if the recipe comes from the web, you instead see a “Get Directions” button that opens an in-app snapshot of the recipe’s source website for further instructions. It would be convenient if Yummly included all the information necessary to make a dish on a single page rather than taking you to different sites or alternate windows. I appreciate that the developer includes a link to the recipe’s original source, but this system adds unnecessary tedium to the cooking process. Chefling and Paprika have dedicated buttons to swap between ingredients and instructions that make them far more intuitive to use while cooking.

Yummly is easy to use, regardless of whether you’re a free user or subscriber. However, there are some important things to consider. Free users have quite a bit of content locked away in plain sight. As you scroll and search for recipes, many of the culinary treats that grace your screen feature a small lock icon in the corner, preventing you from viewing them. These locks only apply to Yummly’s original, video-guided recipes, but these number in the hundreds, and are generally prioritized by the app. As a result, free users see just as many locked recipes as unlocked recipes. If you select a locked recipe, Yummly opens its subscription window to encourage you to sign up for the app’s full functionality.
Buying Groceries and Keeping Stock
Online grocery ordering is uncommon among cooking apps, and it’s one of Yummly’s strongest assets (SideChef is the only other app we’ve tested that offers the feature). Fortunately, grocery shopping is a highly convenient tool that’s available to all Yummly users. You can bulk-add recipe items to your cart with the Shopping button, or scroll through the ingredients list to select specific items to add.

When ready, you tap the order button to buy said ingredients from your nearest participating supermarket via Instacart. This can include Stop & Shop, Key Food, or Walmart depending on where you live. You can schedule either a delivery or an in-store pickup. The timing is fairly reasonable, as well. I added items to my cart at 3:30 p.m., and Instacart promised delivery by a 6 p.m. for a $5.99 fee. In store pickup works the same way, only you are given a designated pickup time while your order is prepared (5 p.m. in this example), for a $1.99 fee.

The system is not perfect, however. Yummly doesn’t aggregate items well, so groceries pop up multiple times in your cart if multiple recipes share an ingredient. For example, if two different recipes call for soy sauce, the app adds two soy sauce bottles to your list. You need to be careful and scrutinize your cart before ordering to make sure you aren’t buying more than you need.

Yummly does not have any digital pantry system either. This feature is invaluable to any home cook, as it makes grocery shopping and meal planning considerably easier when you know what food you have available in your kitchen. Chefling and Paprika both offer handy pantry functionality to manually enter food items in your kitchen, as well as the ability to transfer digital grocery lists over to your pantry inventory.

Meal-Planning Problems

Unfortunately, Yummly gates nutritional information behind its subscription. You can find most recipes online with a basic Google search, so it shouldn’t be a paid privilege to access this information. Yummly’s meal planner is another valuable, locked feature that should be available to everyone. It lets you sort and schedule favorite recipes into daily, weekly, and monthly menus, and even recommends recipes based on the preferences you entered when signing up at first launch.
Meal planning is a relatively bare-bones affair. You can schedule recipes by swiping left on recipes in your Plan section and designating a date and time for them. Yummly features a handy reminder function to tell you exactly when you need to start cooking with notifications. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else that this feature does. You cannot customize recipes to your liking or adjust the servings as Chefling and Paprika’s meal planners let you do. This may be in part due to the fact that most of Yummly’s recipes are pulled from the web, but an in-app tool to let you modify or adjust a recipe is sorely needed. Paprika lets you customize recipes in whatever manner you wish thanks to its highly customizable format, or scale the recipe for more or fewer portions.

The Yummly mobile apps tap your phone’s camera to identify produce, and recommend recipes based on it. I scanned onions and sweet potatoes, for example, and received a trove of recipes including sweet potato casserole, fries, and even a sweet potato curry. Admittedly, the system wasn’t sure what to do with the onions I photographed, so I also received recipes that excluded either the onions or sweet potato. It’s a neat idea, but again, not really worth a subscription. If Yummly offered a pantry-management option like Paprika or BigOven, this function would be a tremendously useful means of inventorying your food. Alas, it does not, so this fascinating function is tragically underutilized as a mere extension of Yummly’s recipe recommendation toolset.

Cooking With Yummly

Yummly has an attractive graphical design, with big, bold meal images to ogle as you scroll up and down the homepage. The contents of these recipes depend on their origin. Yummly’s own original recipes and videos have a short description detailing the dish and its origins, much like many recipe blogs do. Recipes sourced from the web describe the cooking time, and feature relatively large and easy to read text.

However, these recipes don’t come with directions. For that, you must tap the Get Directions button to go to the recipe’s original page. This makes actively reading and cooking much more tedious, since you’ll find yourself constantly reloading both pages as you prepare your meal. Yes, its best you get your mise en place before starting the prep work, but this won’t always be the case for newbie cooks or veterans exploring unfamiliar recipes. Yummly is unnecessarily clunky in this regard.
Unfortunately, you need to go into the settings page to swap between US and metric systems, since you cannot do it on the recipe page. Metric units are generally far more accurate, and particularly useful when baking.

Yummly’s real value, besides its recipe selection, is its premium video content. It features several channels featuring either ethnic or themed foods. Jet Tila’s Journey Through Asia includes guided video recipes for various Asian-inspired dishes, including Korean short rib tacos, drunken noodles, tom yum soup, and orange chicken. These are great for novice cooks trying to expand their culinary horizons. The step-by-step guides break the video up into smaller chunks to highlight every stage of the cooking process, and Yummly incorporates timers and progression buttons to make time management a cinch.

Interestingly, Yummly also has a dedicated video channel that is entirely free for all users: Seconds. These are longform videos (more than ten minutes in length) that are distinct from the step-by-step video guides available to Yummly subscribers. Seconds is presented in the modernized cooking show format popularized by Bon Appetit, Food Network, and Epicurious. Overall, Yummly’s video selection is surprisingly robust.

Needs Some Seasoning

Yummly has many peaks and valleys. The app’s a terrific recipe search engine, but the subscription needlessly gates content that should be included in the app by default. It has useful meal-planning tools, but the simplistic implementation is underwhelming. The service lets you order groceries online, but you can’t customize or modify recipes. For a more balanced cooking app, check out Paprika Recipe Manager, the category’s Editors’ Choice pick. It features highly customizable recipe, editing, and planning features that are ideal for any kitchen.