5 Must Have iPhone Apps For Foodies In 2024
In today's world, we need few things more than our iPhones. They are our primary source of information, communication, and entertainment. While it is a wonderful luxury, there are things we need more in our daily lives. Most importantly, there's food. Without food, we simply could not go on living, whether we were making it at home or heading out to a restaurant. As it happens, the iPhone can actually provide a helpful experience when it comes to food as well.
This is a device that can aid you in every single aspect of helping you figure out what recipe to make or what restaurant to go to. You could be in need of a recipe for the perfect veal piccata or be in desperate need of a mountain of food from The Cheesecake Factory. We are going to count down five different apps that anyone would want on their iPhone for all of their food needs, from food preparation to food management. These apps were selected through a combination of curating professional reviews, user ratings, and personal experience (more on that later).
Samsung Food
If you are someone who finds themselves cooking quite a lot at home, you need a good place to store all of your recipes. These aren't just the recipes that you have created yourself by experimenting in the kitchen but also all of the recipes you have found on various food websites that you have tried and enjoyed. One of the best apps for this out there is Samsung Food. While this officially launched in August of 2023, the bones of this app have been around for much longer, having previously been named Whisk before being acquired by Samsung.
While importing your own recipes is quite easy, Samsung Food really shines in the ease with which you can add recipes from other websites. On an iPhone, you are able to enable a browser share extension for Samsung Food, so if you are on a food website with a recipe, you can quickly add it to your recipe library with just a couple of taps. If you don't want the extension, you can also copy and paste the recipe's URL into Samsung Food for the same result. The app itself also has a bunch of recipes for you to discover as well.
Along with recipe management, Samsung Food also has excellent features for creating grocery lists and meal planning for the week. This is all free, but if you wish, you can sign up for Samsung Food+ to monitor your macros, receive personalized meal plans, and have no ads on the app.
Instacart
For some people, getting to the grocery store is a major hassle. You could be working long hours that give you little time for shopping, have a condition that makes travel difficult, not be in possession of a mode of transportation, or live in a city where walking with a ton of groceries is implausible. You could also just not like going to the grocery store, which is entirely valid as well. No matter which situation applies to you, you still need a way of getting your groceries, and that is where a wonderful app like Instacart comes into play.
Instacart is the premiere grocery delivery service out there. You fire up the app and connect to your local grocery store, be it H-E-B, Publix, Ralph's, wholesale stores like Costco, or even smaller local stores, and you can go through your entire grocery list and have all of the items delivered directly to your home. Orders over $35 require a $3.99 delivery fee for same-day delivery, a service fee, and a proper tip for your shopper/driver, so it will cost you a little more than going to the store yourself.
You can offset those costs somewhat if you sign up for Instacart+, which gets you free deliveries over $35, reduced service fees, and — as of now — a subscription to the Peacock streaming service for an annual fee of $99 after a 14-day trial. For people needing a ton of groceries delivered, those savings could be tremendous, and you can't beat the convenience.
DoorDash
Not everyone out there is a home cooker. They simply do not have the time, the patience, the know-how, or the desire to operate in a kitchen. These people still like to eat at home, though, which is where food delivery apps come into place. If you're hankering for some chicken sandwiches, some pad thai, or anything else, these food delivery services connect you to restaurants in your location to order and have a driver pick them up and bring them directly to you. There are many of them out there, such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Postmates, but the one we recommend is DoorDash.
DoorDash has a very easy-to-navigate design that offers many different restaurant options for you to choose from. If you're also looking to pick up some other items like groceries, you can add that to your order. All of these apps require delivery and service fees, plus a tip for the driver, and while these will always change depending on the time and location, DoorDash is much more reasonable when it comes to smaller orders to minimize these fees. DoorDash also offers its premium plan, DashPass, which gets you $0 delivery and lower service fees for $9.99 per month or $96 per year, which is easily cancellable.
In reality, having several food delivery apps on your iPhone at once is the best option, as you have the chance to get a better deal on any of them at any given time, but if you just want one, make it DoorDash.
Individual restaurant apps
Food delivery apps like DoorDash also offer options for pickup, which eliminates those extra fees (and lowers the price of the actual order itself), but if you are looking to pick up food, it may be better actually to get an app specifically designed for a particular restaurant. For one, you know you will actually be getting the price that it says on the menu, which is not always the case with a third-party app. Secondly, they are far more versatile in customizing an order to your specific wants. Thirdly, you have more options in how you physically pick up your order from the restaurant, as they may offer drive-thru or curbside pickup options.
Most importantly, so many of these restaurants — particularly the larger chain restaurants — offer a rewards program, which can result in you getting plenty of discounted or free food if you are a frequent visitor. For example, McDonald's offers several daily deals, such as $1 for a large order of fries or 40% off 10 McNuggets. Oftentimes, these are deals you can only get if you order through the McDonald's app. Along with those deals, you accrue points for your orders that you can redeem in order to get even more free stuff down the line.
While you might expect these to only exist for big chain companies like Domino's, Chick-fil-A, or Chipotle, you would be surprised how many smaller chains or one-off local spots have its own app as well.
Weight Watchers
With all of the above apps at your disposal, it can be so easy to fall into a pattern of not eating well and treating your body terribly. Convenience with getting food can be nice, but it can quickly spiral into ordering too much too often. I am someone who has struggled with his weight and overeating most of my life, and in all the apps I've used — and I've used them all — the one that has made it the easiest to manage what I am eating is Weight Watchers.
This is a program that has been around since the early 1960s, and with its system of assigning point values to certain foods, it has remained one of the best weight loss and weight management programs out there. It is not a program that tells you what you have to eat, but it keeps you mindful of what food you put into your body. You can have the cheeseburger and fries if you want. You just can't have it for every meal of the day or many times during the week.
Unlike all of the apps mentioned thus far, there is no free version of Weight Watchers, and while the $23 per month fee seems like quite a lot, Weight Watchers gives you much more than simply tracking your food, as you can also browse a massive collection of points-conscious recipes and — if you so choose — connect with a coach to guide you in your journey. Currently, new deals include your first 12 months at a recurring $11 per month, $15 for your first six months, or $23 per month.
Why we selected these apps
The methodology behind why these five particular apps were chosen to be on this list comes in part from being reviewed and recommended by various other publications. For instance, DoorDash was rated the best food delivery app by Good Housekeeping and also comes highly rated by Tom's Guide and CNET. These are also apps that have incredibly high ratings from users in Apple's App Store. Instacart currently has a 4.8 average star rating from 3.4 million users. Samsung Food and Weight Watchers have the same star rating as well.
For this selection of apps, however, the most important factor was personal experience. I have actively used all of these apps for years and have found a level of quality and consistency with them that pushed them above their competitors. Importantly, I have also used them in various locations in the United States, and for food delivery and grocery shopping apps in particular, quality can vary wildly depending on where you are. The apps chosen here have rarely let me down in my personal use. While the reviews of others certainly played a part in choosing these five, personal experience was the ultimate deciding factor.