A Little Help from the Robots 🤖🍳

We’re excited to share our biggest update yet: Version 1.1.0 is here, bringing powerful new tools, faster ways to create recipes, and a few fun surprises along the way.

Your AI Sous Chef Has Arrived

Meet the new AI Assistant, powered by ChatGPT.

Whether you’re stuck on a cooking question, trying to convert a recipe from a photo, PDF, screenshot, or handwritten note, your AI Sous Chef is ready to help. You can even import recipes directly into Recipe Resizer without manually typing them out.

To get started, simply tap the Create (+) button in the app.

Import Recipes from Your Desktop Browser

Cooking on your computer?

Our new Chrome Extension lets you send recipes from desktop websites directly to Recipe Resizer. Just scan a QR code with your phone and continue cooking with all the resizing and conversion tools you already love.

Check it out here

Create Recipes in a Flash

We’ve added a new Home Screen Quick Action that makes creating recipes even faster.

Simply press and hold the Recipe Resizer app icon and jump straight into recipe creation — no extra taps required.

Share to Instagram Stories

Showing off your favorite recipes is now easier than ever.

You can now share recipes directly to Instagram Stories with a single tap, making it simple to share what you’re cooking with friends and family.

New Summer Collectables ☀️

A fresh batch of summer-themed Collectables has arrived!

Keep an eye on our social channels, newsletter, and website for clues on how to unlock them all.

Improvements & Fixes

As always, we’ve continued polishing the app behind the scenes. Version 1.1.0 includes bug fixes, accessibility improvements, and quality-of-life enhancements designed to make Recipe Resizer smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.

Thank you for supporting Recipe Resizer. Every download, review, share, and piece of feedback helps us continue building the cooking companion we’ve always wanted to use ourselves.

Happy cooking,

Scott & Anya

Team Recipe Resizer 🥕

If you would like to support us, give Recipe Resizer a try by downloading it on the Apple App Store here! Thank you.

Check out Recipe Resizer on Instagram, X, and TikTok. Follow our Blog or Newsletter to be the first to hear about new updates around the app.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to reach out to us, check out our Website and socials on Linktree!

Sometimes the best ideas come from asking one simple question to the person sitting across the table.

For me, that person was my wife, Anya.

I already owned a software consulting and development company called Night Owl Labs, where I spent my time building software for clients. But I’d been itching to build another app — something of our own.

I wanted to create software that solved a real, everyday problem. The only thing I was missing was the idea.

So one evening, I turned to Anya and asked,

“If you could have an app solve one everyday problem, what would it be?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Recipe apps don’t actually resize recipes.”

That answer immediately caught my attention.

Anya is a classically trained chef who spent years working in some of New York City’s finest kitchens, like Le Cirque. If anyone understood the frustrations of following recipes day after day, it was her.

I replied,

“What? Sure they do. I’ve used some of them”

But then she explained what she meant.

Half the recipe? Divide everything by two. Triple it? Multiply everything by three.

In theory, that works.

In a real kitchen, it often doesn’t. It doesn’t output a sensible measurement that’s cooking friendly.

A pinch of salt isn’t always half a pinch. Six teaspoons should become two tablespoons instead of staying as six teaspoons. Fractions become awkward. Measurements become difficult to read. Recipes quickly become cluttered with numbers that technically work but don’t feel natural while you’re cooking.

As someone who writes software, that fascinated me.

As someone who had cooked professionally for years, it frustrated Anya.

So we decided to combine both our areas of expertise, culinary and software development, and build something better.

Introducing Recipe Resizer.

The Conversion Factor and Why We Went the Extra Step

At first, I honestly thought recipe resizing would be one of the easier parts of the app to build.

I knew professional chefs used something called a conversion factor to scale recipes. You simply divide the desired number of servings by the original number of servings.

For example, if a recipe serves 6 people and you want it to serve 20, the conversion factor is 3.33:

• 20 ÷ 6 = 3.33

From there, every ingredient gets multiplied by that conversion factor.

Simple.

Or so I thought…

For example, if a recipe originally calls for:

• 2 cups of flour
• 3 teaspoons of baking powder

Multiplying both by 3.33 gives:

• 6.66 cups of flour
• 9.99 teaspoons of baking powder

Technically, those numbers are correct.

But they’re not the way most people would write — or read — a recipe.

This is the moment I realized multiplying ingredients wasn’t really the hard part.

The math itself wasn’t difficult.

Writing an algorithm that produced measurements one would actually want to cook with was.

The output that would make sense is:

• 6½ cups, 2 tablespoons, 2 teaspoons flour
• 3 tablespoons, 1 teaspoon baking powder

This is what we set out to do, we wanted to avoid cooking with 9.99 teaspoons.

My first implementation simply multiplied every ingredient by the conversion factor. Technically, it worked. But again, the results felt robotic.

Measurements became awkward, decimals were everywhere, and recipes quickly looked like they had been generated by a calculator instead of written for someone standing in a kitchen.

• Should 3 teaspoons become 1 tablespoon?
• Should 0.66 cups stay that way, or become ⅔ cup?
• When should a measurement stay precise, and when should it be rounded into something that’s easier to read?

Those questions took far longer to answer than I ever expected.

So I went back to the drawing board

“Scaling recipes up (or down) in a sensible way was a harder challenge than I realized”

The algorithm still begins with the same conversion factor chefs have relied on for years, but that’s only the first step. After every ingredient is scaled, Recipe Resizer analyzes the result and converts it into the most reasonable measurement whenever possible — choosing cleaner fractions, more familiar units, and easier-to-read measurements that feel like they were written that way from the beginning.

Building Recipe Resizer

Recipe Resizer became a true collaboration between us. It took two years (and no AI at the time). Every line of code, every design — handcrafted.

Anya led much of the visual design while we worked together on the user experience. Every screen was discussed from the perspective of someone standing in a kitchen with flour on their hands — not someone sitting behind a desk.

My role was turning those conversations into software.

“Every design decision was intentional — even the app icon. Instead of using a generic cooking symbol, we designed two bowls connected by an arrow, with the ingredients growing from one bowl to the next. It’s a simple visual metaphor for what Recipe Resizer does: helping recipes grow or shrink to the perfect size.”

As we continued building, we realized people needed more than just a recipe scaler.

• We added the ability to import recipes from websites (that was fun… I think I’ll write another blog post just to explain this)
• We built a space called Learn, filled with cooking tips and techniques to help people become more confident in the kitchen.
• We provided the ability to email our chef (Anya) directly with culinary questions within the app.
• More recently, we introduced an AI cooking assistant that can answer cooking questions and help convert recipes from photos, PDFs, handwritten recipe cards, and other file formats into recipes you can keep organized in one place. Grandma’s hand written recipe? We’ve got you covered.
• We also built a Google Chrome extension to import recipes from your desktop right into the app.

The app slowly evolved from solving one problem into becoming a kitchen companion. It became a full blown recipe manager — your one stop shop for all your cooking needs.

Designing Something That Felt Human

One thing we noticed while researching other cooking apps was how many felt cold and overly complicated.

We wanted Recipe Resizer to feel warm, welcoming, and approachable — the kind of app you’d actually enjoy using while making dinner.

Every screen, interaction, and line of code was carefully handcrafted by us, with AI used only where it genuinely helped — not as a replacement for thoughtful design or craftsmanship.

Not to mention, all those we tried out, scaled recipes by using the conversion factor alone, they did not take the crucial and extra step to “show it in a sensible way” — and don’t get us started on subscriptions, we wanted our users to actually own the software, not rent it from us forever like most things today.

Launch Day

After countless late nights, design revisions, beta testing (a big shout out to our friends/family who helped us test it), bug fixes, and more cups of coffee than I’d like to admit, Recipe Resizer finally launched on the App Store.

Launching an app is exciting, but it’s also a little terrifying.

You spend months — or years — building something that people will judge within seconds. But we were optimistic. We built Recipe Resizer with our hearts, guided from start to finish by one simple philosophy: treat others as you would like to be treated.

Seeing those first downloads and reading our first reviews made all of those late nights worth it.

Looking Ahead

Recipe Resizer isn’t “finished.”

In many ways, it’s just getting started.

We have a growing roadmap of ideas (we strive to be as transparent as possible), new features we’d love to build, and improvements based on feedback from the people who actually use the app.

That’s one of the advantages of building an independent app. We can keep listening. We can keep improving. And we can keep building the product we wish existed when this journey began.

It all started with a simple question asked across the kitchen table.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Thanks for following along on our journey.

Happy cooking 🥕,

Scott & Anya Grivner — Founders, Night Owl Labs

If you would like to support us, give Recipe Resizer a try by downloading it on the Apple App Store here! Thank you.

Check out Recipe Resizer on Instagram, X, and TikTok. Follow our Blog or Newsletter to be the first to hear about new updates around the app.

Oh… one more thing, check out our “Collectables”

One of our favorite features in Recipe Resizer is Collectables — hidden digital keepsakes (app icons and recipes made by us) you can unlock within the app. Some celebrate major app updates, holidays, or seasonal events, while others are discovered by following clues or taking part in special community moments.

To commemorate this article, we’re releasing an exclusive hand drawn app icon collectable, just for Medium, above. It’s our way of saying thank you for taking the time to read about how Recipe Resizer came to life. Scan the QR code above to unlock it within the app!

I’d like to give a shoutout to the indie developers over at Impeding Inc. for the inspiration behind this idea; check out their To-Do list app Clear — We’ve used it for years to help us stay organized.

Take care!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to reach out to us, check out our Website and socials on Linktree!