Creating Recipes

Overview & My Recipes
The process of building out the recipes that will be used in all future meal plans may take some time up front to enter manually (or import from the Wholesum Cookbook), but is one of the core building blocksof the meal planning process. This way, you have complete control over your recipes as you alwayshave. By investing time on the front end, during recipe creation, you’ll save countless hours (and poundsof food!) on the back end during the meal planning and shopping process.

To view your recipes, click on “My Recipes” from the homepage or navigation bar. You can think of this page as your own personal recipe box that will be used for selecting which meal to serve for each group. If you’d like to see a shortened view of the list of your recipes, use the “Category” or “Tag” filters in the upper right. Categories are pre-defined meal groups (e.g. Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner) and Tags are custom-defined labels (e.g. quick, easy, no heat required) that you can assign to any recipe for easy sorting.

CREATING RECIPES

There are four ways to add recipes to “My Recipes”:

1. Create a recipe from scratch
2. Import a recipe from most recipes you find online
3. Use AI to generate recipes for you
4. Browse the list of recipe collections shared by other Wholesum users

1. Manually:

To create a recipe of your own, click “Create New Recipe” on the “My Recipes” page.
Important information when creating your own recipe:

•  Recipe Name: Name your recipe to find it easier later during the meal planning process
• Servings per Recipe: This field allows you to enter the number of servings that the recipe will
  feed with the volumes of food you’ll list below. The recipe and all ingredient quantities will be
  scaled later, during meal planning. For example, you may create a recipe for Spaghetti and Red Sauce which would feed 5 people with average appetite sizes. In doing so, you would select “5” in the servings per recipe field. Then, in the next step, include all quantities to feed 5 people. The group sizes you set subsequently during menu creation will then be scaled appropriately.
• Recipe Ingredients & Quantities: The next section allows you to define each ingredient with
  four pieces of information:

   

  • Qty: This is the quantity in numeric terms (not fractions) of the corresponding unit
  • Unit: You can select any unit from this list in volume, weight, or whole terms.

    HINT: Wholesum will not automatically convert weight to volume or visa-versa. See “Weight to Volume Conversions” in section 6.2 with suggestions on how to manage ingredients where weight and volume are both used (e.g. Rice is purchased by weight but measured in recipes using volume).

  • Ingredient: Here you can define the name of the ingredient (e.g. Brown Rice). As you type, Wholesum will provide suggestions of ingredients found in your other recipes in case this is the same ingredient used elsewhere.
  • Store (Optional): If you’d like to indicate which store this ingredient is typically purchased at, you can include this information here.
  • Cost (Optional, Professional & Enterprise Accounts): Use the calculator icon to define costs for ingredients if you’d like to. This can also be managed from the “Ingredients” page. Define the typical purchasing quantity (eg. 12 whole eggs) and the price you pay for that quantity (eg. $3.50

2. From URL:

The recipe decluttering tool can be used to import almost any recipe found online.  Copy and paste the recipe URL into this tool and it will automatically prime it to be imported into your Wholesum account.  The tool will walk you through ingredient-by-ingredient to make sure that we match up any potential existing ingredients from other recipes to avoid creating duplicates.

3. AI Generated Recipes:  Wholesum uses Chat-GPT to create recipes that are formated to be imported directly into your list of recipes.  It goes one step further and also reviews your current list of ingredients from other recipes to see if we can use some existing ingredients in the recipe rather than adding new ones to your list.  Keep in mind that these recipes might not be perfect and should be reviewed thoroughly before being used for your meal plan.

4. Browse Recipes: Using the Wholesum recipe collections, you can review recipes shared by other Wholesum users and import them into your own recipe list