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Heilsa

Heilsa and recipe apps

Recipe apps are good at showing you food. They are not built to know whether you can make any of it tonight.

A recipe page for Sticky Gochujang Chicken: its picture, 35 minutes, serves 4, dairy-free and gluten-free, about 685 kcal a serving with protein, carbs and fat, an Add to plan button and its allergens.
  • ShakshukaYou have everything for it.
  • Chickpea and Spinach CurryOnly missing Garam masala.

What recipe apps do well

  • Enormous catalogues, well photographed and well tested.
  • Genuinely good for open-ended browsing and discovering a cuisine you do not know.
  • Strong search when you already know what you want to make.

Where they stop

  • They do not know what is in your kitchen.
  • They do not know what your partner bought this morning.
  • Checking whether you can make a saved recipe is still a manual pass down the ingredient list.

What Heilsa does instead

  • Recipes are checked against your shared pantry before you see them.
  • What you can cook now is separated from what you cannot.
  • Plan a recipe and what it is missing goes on the shopping list, with the recipe attached.

Inspiration is not the bottleneck

Most households are not short of recipes. They are short of an answer to whether tonight is possible with what is in the cupboard. That question needs pantry state, which a recipe app has no way to hold.

Your recipes, not just ours

Heilsa holds the recipes you actually cook. Share one from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a website, photograph a cookbook page or a card in someone else’s handwriting, paste a link, or write it out, and Heilsa reads it into a proper recipe for you to check. Once it is in, it behaves like everything else: checked against the pantry, ranked for a plan slot, and, once planned, putting what is missing on the shopping list.

Where a big catalogue still wins

A recipe app with a decade of commissioned photography and tested variations is better than Heilsa at open-ended discovery — the evening you want to browse three hundred things you have never made. Heilsa is narrower on purpose: a hundred curated recipes plus whatever your household adds, all of it answerable against your kitchen.

In the app

Where to look in Heilsa.

  • The Recipes tab: a card explaining how to save recipes from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, websites and photos, above a recipe card for Mushroom and Spinach Scramble marked Can make now.

    Recipe import

    Save a recipe from any app

    Share a reel, a TikTok, a YouTube video, a recipe page or a photo to Heilsa, and it comes back as a recipe for you to check.

    Recipe import in detail
  • The Pantry wall: 49 foods at home, each a drawing with its name. A Use soon shelf at the top holds banana and chicken thigh, both today, and the leftover curry is under Made at home.

    Pantry wall

    A pantry that tells you what to use first

    Every food at home on one wall, each with its own drawing, and a Use soon shelf on top for whatever has the least time left.

    Pantry wall in detail
  • The sheet for adding a dinner to Monday: leftovers from Sunday first, then Potato and Cheddar Frittata (you have everything for it) and two curries each missing one spice.

    Meal planning

    Dinner plans that start from the fridge

    Plan up to a fortnight of dinners. Heilsa ranks the choices by what needs using and what you already have, and leaves the deciding to you.

    Meal planning in detail

Questions

Plain answers.

Can I add my own recipes?
Yes. Share it from another app, paste a link, photograph it — up to three photos of a page or card — or write it out. Heilsa reads it into a recipe you check before saving, and you can edit or delete it afterwards.
Is Heilsa a recipe app?
It is a recipe app with a pantry underneath it. Recipes are searchable and cookable in their own right; what is different is that every one of them already knows whether you can make it.

Other comparisons

Try it with your own kitchen

Heilsa comes to the App Store in November. Join now, through TestFlight, and your household keeps it free through 2027.

Install with TestFlight

iPhone with iOS 15.1 or later, in the UK and Switzerland. Somewhere else?