Larderlee answers one question: what can I cook right now?
To do that it needs two things from you — some recipes you like, and a rough idea of what is in your kitchen. Neither has to be complete or tidy. The app is useful from about ten pantry items and three recipes, and gets better as you go.
There are four ways, and they all end at the same review screen so you can fix anything before it is saved.
Paste a link. Recipe sites, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook. This is the fast one — a well-built recipe site imports in under a second and costs nothing.
Paste the text. Select the whole page, copy, paste. Navigation and comments come along with it and that is fine; they are ignored.
Photo or screenshot. A cookbook page, a recipe card, a friend's handwriting, or a screenshot of a page that would not import.
Write it yourself. A blank recipe.
Some sites refuse to be read by anything that is not a person with a browser. It is not a fault in the app and not something the app can talk its way past. When it happens you are offered two ways through, and a screenshot is the quicker of the two.
The ingredients, the method, the timings, the servings, and a link back to where it came from. Not the article, the author's story, or their photographs — those belong to whoever wrote them. You can add your own photo to any recipe.
Scan your kitchen. Photograph a shelf, a fridge, an open cupboard. It reads what it can see and shows you the list before anything is added.
Scan one item. For a single thing you are holding.
Barcode. Reads the product and its nutrition from the label.
Scan a receipt. A shop's worth in one photo.
Add by hand. Always there, always works.
Nothing is ever added without you seeing it first. Items get an estimated expiry based on what they are and where you keep them — that is an estimate, not a reading of your actual food.
Once there are recipes and a pantry, the home screen sorts your recipes into what you can make now and what you are one or two ingredients short of.
A recipe shows exactly what is missing, and you can send those straight to the shopping list.
Cooking mode keeps the screen awake and walks the steps. When you finish, Larderlee offers to take the ingredients out of your pantry — it never does that without asking, because being wrong about your food is worse than being asked.
Two or more people, one pantry and one recipe box.
One person creates the kitchen and invites the others by email or by sharing a code. Everyone in a kitchen can see and edit its recipes and pantry.
Things you had before you joined stay private until you tap Share my recipes and pantry. Leaving a kitchen takes your own things back out with you — you never lose them, and the others stop seeing them.
The toggle Keep new items private puts you back in your own kitchen without leaving.
Every receipt you scan is remembered: what each thing cost, where, and when. Open any pantry item to see what you have paid for it over time, and the shopping list shows roughly what you last paid for each line. This is your own record; it is never pooled with anyone else's.
Deals nearby checks the things on your shopping list against what is reduced at shops near your ZIP code. The ZIP code is used for nothing else.
When something leaves your kitchen, the app asks whether you used it up or threw it out. Cooking counts as used on its own. What you threw away adds up the bin with the prices from your receipts and tells you what keeps ending up in it; anything binned twice lately is flagged on the shopping list so you can buy less. Things added by hand have no price and are counted, not valued.
Produce gets an estimate from how that food usually keeps. A packet is judged by the date printed on it: the app reads it off the photo when it is legible, and you can type or correct it before saving, or on the item later. An estimate says "about 5 days left"; a date from the packet says "use by 14 Mar 2027". Neither is a safety guarantee - trust the packaging, storage and your own senses over the app.
Ask it things in plain language:
It answers from your own kitchen, not from the internet.
Figures come from labels, from a public food database, and from software reading recipes. They are estimates, and Larderlee tells you when it is working from incomplete data rather than quietly filling the gap with zero.
You can list ingredients to avoid, and recipes containing them are hidden. That matches ingredient names against a list — it cannot know what is inside a packaged product unless you scan its barcode, and it knows nothing about how something was prepared.
If something matters medically, read the packaging and ask someone qualified. Larderlee is not a medical device and does not pretend to be.
Most of the app is free: up to 50 recipes saved from links or text, 3 photo imports and 20 smart requests a month, barcode scanning, collections, and exporting everything you have.
Plus adds unlimited recipes and photo imports, social import, receipt and kitchen scanning, the assistant, ingredient substitutions, meal planning, and shared kitchens. It is billed through the App Store or Google Play, and you cancel it there.
Your kitchen and your recipes are private to you, and to your household if you are in one. They are never published or shown to other users.
Photos you scan and pages you import are sent to an AI provider to be read — that is the one significant thing that leaves the server, and it is explained in full in the Privacy Policy.
You can export everything as a file, or delete your account and all of it, at any time.