Documentation
Ingredients & Prices
The shared ingredient catalog that connects recipes, pantry, and shopping, and the price data that powers cost estimates.
The Ingredient Catalog
Foodex keeps one shared catalog of ingredients. When a recipe says "flour", your pantry says "flour", and your shopping list says "flour", they all point at the same catalog entry. That link is what makes the app smart: it's how Foodex knows the flour in your pantry satisfies the flour in a recipe.
The catalog is shared across all households and openly editable, like a wiki: anyone can add ingredients, fix names, and record prices, and everyone benefits.
Adding and Editing Ingredients
Ingredients get created wherever you need them: in the recipe editor, the pantry, or the barcode scanner, as well as on the Ingredients page itself. An ingredient has:
- A name.
- A default unit (grams, milliliters, pieces, and so on).
- An optional density, which unlocks conversion between weight and volume (see below).
- Brands, if you care to distinguish them.
- An always on hand flag for staples like water and salt: they scale in recipes but are never bought or counted as missing.
Advanced: unit conversion
Foodex converts between compatible units automatically: a recipe wanting 0.5kg is satisfied by 500g in the pantry. With a density set, it also converts across weight and volume, so 250ml of honey can count against a recipe that wants 340g. Everything then displays in your preferred unit system (metric or imperial), whatever units the recipe was written in.
Recording Prices
On an ingredient's page you can record what it costs where:
- Pick a store and optionally a brand.
- Enter the price and the amount it buys, like $2.50 per 500g. Foodex works out unit prices from that, so pack sizes don't matter.
Prices also flow in as you live: the barcode scanner and the shopping list both let you record the price you actually paid while you're at it. You don't have to enter prices in bulk; add them as you shop, and estimates sharpen over time.
What Prices Power
- Recipe cost estimates: per-ingredient and total cost on every recipe, scaled with the servings.
- Shopping totals: per-store subtotals and a running total as you tick things off.
- Cheapest-store suggestions when the list groups by store.
Merging Duplicate Ingredients
A shared catalog accumulates duplicates ("flour", "all-purpose flour", "Flour"). Merging combines two entries into one and repoints everything that referenced the duplicate: recipes, pantry items, prices, and shopping lines all follow automatically. Merge generously; one well-connected entry beats three fragmented ones, because pantry matching only works when everyone points at the same entry.