For professional kitchens · $49 once, not a subscription
Scale recipes accurately, convert quantities intelligently, and turn a menu into a usable production plan.
The free version is the real app — it loads a demo kitchen in one tap. No sign-up.
× 3.75 taste check
At large factors, salt gets flagged — not silently multiplied.
4,535.9 g → 4.54 kg
Every quantity comes back in a unit a cook can measure.
140 ÷ 30 → 5 × 28
Batches split evenly to your equipment — no lopsided last batch.
Why it’s not a calculator
Naive multiplication is what every spreadsheet already does badly. ScaleChef makes the calls a calculator can’t — and every one of them is arithmetic you can check.
8 g → 30 g taste check
At ×3.75 ScaleChef flags the ingredients that don’t scale linearly and tells you to season in stages and taste. Scaling those straight is how a 10× batch gets ruined — and no calculator warns you.
128 tbsp → 8 cups
4,535.9 g becomes 4.54 kg. US volumes snap to the fractions a measuring spoon actually has, because 0.37 tsp is not a real instruction anyone can follow.
140 ÷ 30 → 5 × 28
140 portions of mash through a 30-portion mixer comes back as 5 even batches of 28 — not four full batches and one lopsided runt. Ingredient quantities are shown per batch, so the plan goes straight to the station.
10 lb EP → order 12.2 lb
10 lb of cleaned carrots at 82% yield means ordering 12.2 lb. The shopping list carries the as-purchased number — and says so on the line, so nobody orders the trimmed weight by mistake.
Garlic across five recipes becomes one number, grouped by section of the walk-in. Every line shows which recipes it came from, so a wrong number is auditable.
The importer reads recipes as pasted text. Anything it can’t read is shown to you to fix by hand — it never silently drops a line.
All math runs on exact base units; rounding happens only on screen. Five batches is 5× the exact amount, not 5× a rounded one.
From the shipped app
Every number below was produced by the engine — the same one you can try right now, free.
What it costs
Not a subscription, and here’s why it doesn’t need to be. ScaleChef runs entirely on your own device. There is no server and no account behind it — so there is no monthly cost for anyone to pass on to you.
Buy it once and it’s yours. It installs to a phone or tablet home screen from the browser, and it works offline — in a walk-in with no signal, forever. Your recipes stay on your device and are yours to export.
Every number is plain arithmetic — no AI in the math — and the engine is tested against hand-computed values, including every worked example on this page.
$49one time
Yours on every device you install it on.
Who it’s for
Scale tonight’s prep from the master recipe in units the line can measure — instead of the phone calculator and a guess on the salt.
150 guests plus a 5% buffer is 158 portions — set the count once and the whole menu scales together, warnings included.
One consolidated shopping list per event, grouped the way the walk-in is — print it and hand it to whoever is ordering.
Print the prep sheet with per-batch quantities already worked out and tape it to the station for the morning crew.
Straight answers
Yes, fully. It’s an installable web app: after the first load, everything runs on your device. No signal in the walk-in changes nothing.
No. There is nothing to sign up for and no server behind the app.
On your device. Recipes are stored in the browser’s local storage, and you can export the whole book as a file any time — for backup, or to hand your recipes to another chef.
Being honest: if you clear the browser’s site data, your recipes go with it. Export a backup once in a while.
Not yet. The data model has a place reserved for ingredient cost, but nothing in the app prices a recipe today. If you’re buying it for costing, wait. Buy it for scaling, conversion, batch planning and ordering — that’s what it does now, and does well.
It shows you every line it couldn’t parse, exactly as you pasted it, and you fix it by hand before anything is saved. An importer that quietly drops two ingredients out of fourteen is worse than none — so this one never drops a line.
No. Every number is plain arithmetic, tested against hand-computed values. The same input always gives the same answer — which is also why it can run free of accounts, servers and monthly fees.
The free version is the full app with a demo kitchen loaded — scale something, split it into batches, build a shopping list. Then decide.