How to Move Your Family's Recipes to a New App

Ammar Khatib · 20 October 2026

Calendars move. Shopping lists mostly move. Recipes are the thing that traps people in a family app they have outgrown, because there is usually no way to get them out and the thought of re-typing forty of them is enough to stop the whole switch.

Here is the realistic version — including the part where you move far fewer than you think.

Why recipes never export

Almost no family app offers a recipe export. It is not usually malice; recipes are stored as a mixture of free text, ingredient lists, photos and links, and there is no widely-adopted standard for exchanging them between consumer apps. Dedicated recipe managers sometimes support import formats. Family organisers almost never do.

So the honest starting point is: there will be no file. You are moving this by hand, and the job is to make "by hand" as small as possible.

First, count how many you actually cook

This is the step that turns a two-evening job into a forty-minute one.

Open your recipe box and go through it once with one question: have we made this in the last year?

Most families find the answer is eight to fifteen recipes out of thirty or forty. The rest are things somebody saved once, intended to try, and never made. Those are not recipes, they are good intentions, and moving them into a new app means starting the new app already cluttered.

Move the ones you cook. Screenshot the rest if you cannot bear to lose them, and put the screenshots somewhere that is not your new recipe box.

The four routes out, in order of how well they work

1. The print view, copied as text. Most apps have a print option, usually on the web rather than mobile. Open it, but instead of printing, select the text and copy it. Paste into a note, tidy it, paste into the new app. This is the least bad route and it works almost everywhere.

2. Retype from the source. If a recipe came from a website or a book, it is often faster to go back to the original than to wrestle it out of the app. You also get the recipe as written rather than whatever survived being saved.

3. Photograph the screen. Fastest, worst result. You end up with images you cannot search, cannot scale, and cannot add to a shopping list. Acceptable as a temporary parking place for the ones you are unsure about. Not acceptable as the destination.

4. A formal data request. Under EU law you can ask a company for your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and they generally have a month to respond. Whether recipes come back in a usable shape is another question, and it is slower than typing fifteen of them. Worth doing if you have hundreds, or if you also want everything else.

Retype properly while you are there

If you are typing anyway, take the extra thirty seconds per recipe:

Ingredients as a real list, one per line, with quantities at the start. This is what lets an app add them to a shopping list later — the single most useful thing a recipe in a family app can do.

Method as numbered steps, short ones. A wall of text is unreadable on a phone propped against a mixing bowl.

A note about your family, not the original author's. "Emma will not eat the peppers." "Double the sauce." "45 min in our oven, not 35." That is the part that makes a family recipe box worth more than a website, and it is the part nobody ever writes down.

Do this last, not first

If you are switching apps, move the calendar first, the shopping list second, and the recipes last.

The calendar and the list have daily payoffs — everybody feels them within days, which is what makes a new app stick. Recipes have a weekly payoff at best, and the work is front-loaded. Families who start with the recipes usually stall before they finish, and then they have two half-populated apps and no momentum.

Move the calendar and lists, live in the new app for two weeks, and only then do a single evening of recipes. By then you will also have a much clearer sense of which ones you actually cook, because you will have cooked them.