Paste a recipe link. Get the ingredients. Done.

You find a recipe you want to try. Maybe it's on a cooking blog, maybe it's from a food site you've been saving things on. You open your shopping list and start typing — chicken breast, two cloves garlic, half a lemon, a tin of chopped tomatoes — and then you get to the end and realise you've already got half of these and you can't remember which ones you typed. A 2025 study of American Time Use Survey data found 62% of American adults cooked in 2023, up from 53% in 2003.

How it works

Recipe import works in three steps. Copy the link to any recipe page, paste it into Shopolit, and the ingredients are extracted and added to the list. No typing and no switching between the recipe and the list is needed. Recipe import is part of the Plus plan.

Recipe import in Shopolit works like this: copy the URL of any recipe page, paste it into Shopolit, and every ingredient is extracted and added to your list automatically. No typing, no switching between apps, no missing items.

It works on most major recipe sites — food blogs, big cooking platforms, anywhere a recipe is written up properly. If the page is paywalled or the recipe is buried in a video, it will let you know rather than silently adding nothing.

What does this look like in practice?

Suppose you find a weeknight pasta recipe with several ingredients while you are on your lunch break. Instead of typing each one into the list and checking what the house already has, you paste the link and the ingredients arrive on the shared list. You can then review them before shopping.

Say you find a weeknight pasta recipe with 9 ingredients while you're on your lunch break. Instead of typing each one into your list — and stopping to check whether you already have garlic or half the spices — you paste the link. Shopolit reads the ingredient list, checks it against what's already on your list, and adds only what's missing. By the time you're done reading the recipe itself, the shopping is already sorted.

This matters more for households than it might seem: whoever finds the recipe usually isn't the one doing the shopping. Recipe import means the ingredients land straight on the shared list, so the person shopping doesn't need the recipe forwarded to them at all. Cooking for one recipe at a time versus shopping for an entire event are different scales of the same problem — Shopolit handles both.

Recipe import is part of Shopolit Plus. Paste as many recipe links as you like and let your list build itself. See what's in Plus.

Common questions

Does it work for recipes I've saved as photos?

Not yet. Recipe import currently works from a URL, so it needs the recipe to be a real webpage Shopolit can read directly, not a photo of a page or a screenshot from an app. If you've saved a recipe as an image — a screenshot from social media, a photo of a cookbook page — you'd need to type the ingredients in by hand for now, the same way you would with any list. Most major recipe sites and food blogs work fine as a URL, so this mainly affects recipes that only ever existed as an image, not ones you found on a real website.

What happens with duplicate ingredients?

Shopolit checks what's already on your list before adding anything from a new recipe. If garlic is already on the list, pasting in a recipe that also needs garlic won't create a second, duplicate "garlic" entry. Instead, the existing item stays as one line, so your list doesn't slowly fill up with near-identical entries every time you import a new recipe. This matters more the more recipes you paste in over a week — without it, a handful of recipes that all call for onion, garlic, and olive oil would otherwise leave you with three or four copies of each on the same list.