6 Best Culinary Apps for Food Professionals
The right app can improve your life – personally and professionally. Culinary apps are a favorite for home chefs, but professional chefs require tools with a little more heft.
Below, you'll find 6 culinary apps to make life easier for food and beverage industry professionals.
In honor of Food Safety Month, we'll start with food safety apps and move on to cooking and culinary apps that can keep up with professional chefs.
Formatize (Food Safety App on iOS and Android)
Formatize is a food safety app/subscription service for bringing inspection paperwork into the modern era with features like:
- Customizable/custom forms
- Smart form features including dynamic questions and required fields
- Integrated voice-to-text and QR/Bar Code scanning
- Photo capture and an integrated drawing tool
- Onscreen signatures with timestamp and GPS recording
- Automated tasks and workflows based on smart logic
- Recurring or one-off task scheduling and job management
The system allows you to track and monitor everything from temperature checks to cleaning and maintenance to staff training.
Price: $29.99/mo for restaurants (free trial available)
iAuditor (Food Safety App on iOS and Android)
iAuditor is another inspection checklist application with many of the same bells and whistles as Formatize, like smart customizable forms, photo capture, and task/job scheduling.
However, iAuditor also allows you to connect environmental sensors (yours or theirs) to the app. That means you can get an immediate notification when your freezer drops out of the normal temperature range.
Price: Free up to 8 inspections per month, $19/user/mo for unlimited
Chef's Feed (Culinary App on iOS and Android)
Chef's Feed is a network of top food and beverage industry professionals in your pocket.
"Discover" professionally-vetted hot spots and get recommendations on best dishes. You'll also find videos and articles from top professionals that you can use to up your own game.
Price: Free
Paprika (Recipe Management App on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows)
The Paprika Recipe Manager provides the perfect digital place to manage your own recipes, which makes it the perfect professional chef app.
It's a great organizing tool, with the features you'll find in many cooking apps. Recipes can be categorized or searched by ingredient, and the app will also generate smart grocery lists, a pantry inventory (including expirations), daily/weekly/monthly meal planners, and reusable menus. Of course, all this syncs to the cloud.
But the kitchen is where Paprika really shines. The app conveniently keeps the screen on when you're in cooking mode and you can easily switch between active (pinned) recipes. You can scale ingredients to the serving size you need and convert measurements. Cook times automatically create an integrated timer. You can embed photos for illustration purposes, bold or italicize phrases so you don't miss important steps, and you can cross off or highlight items as you work the recipe.
Price: Free (up to 50 recipes) on Android, $4.99 iOS/pro, $29.99 for Mac or Windows
Cooking by Portable Knowledge LLC (Cooking Reference App on iOS and Amazon)
Cooking by Portable Knowledge LLC (formerly Knowledge Book: Cooking) lives up to its original name. It's your quick reference for obscure cooking terminology, yields, equivalents, substitutions, and other tidbits you need for interpreting or adapting recipes.
Price: Free
Wolfram Culinary Mathematics Reference (Cooking Reference App on iOS)
Put WolframAlpha's "computational intelligence" to work in your kitchen with their Culinary Mathematics Reference App.
In addition to practicalities like converting between units or scaling recipes, you can use data to improve the profitability of your business. Find average prices for ingredients in your area. Estimate yields more accurately to avoid under- or over-ordering. You can even calculate the cost of food per recipe, per unit, and per portion, with options to use yield percent or trim.
Price: $1.99
Learn2Serve by 360training (Food and Alcohol Compliance Training on all devices)
We've been a trusted provider of online compliance training in the food and beverage industry for over 20 years, with state-approved, ANSI-accredited courses in food handling, food protection management, alcohol seller/server, and more. Our courses are mobile-friendly and we offer whole-business solutions for your compliance training needs. Contact us today!
