Samsung Food
Samsung Food is an all-in-one cooking app for home cooks: save recipes from any website, plan the week's meals, build grocery lists and join communities. Rebranded from Whisk in 2023, it uses OpenAI to generate and adapt recipes.
What is Samsung Food?
Samsung Food is a consumer cooking app built around four connected tools: a recipe box, a meal planner, a grocery list and recipe-sharing communities. It is published by Foodient Limited — a company registered in England and Wales on 22 March 2012, with its registered office at 483 Green Lanes, London N13 4BS and VAT number 140606741 — which describes itself as part of the wider Samsung group. That distinction is worth holding on to: the app is not built by Samsung Electronics itself.
The story starts as Whisk. Founder Nick Holzherr reached the final of the BBC's The Apprentice in 2012, secured a first investment round and opened an office in Birmingham; iPhone and Android apps followed in 2013 and 2014. By 2018 the technology was powering publishers and retailers at a claimed half a billion recipe impressions a month, and the company bought the German start-up Avocando. In March 2019 Whisk joined Samsung NEXT and the team passed a hundred people. At IFA Berlin in August 2023 it was officially renamed Samsung Food. The premium Samsung Food+ subscription arrived at IFA 2024, alongside a Samsung Health integration and a CES 2024 Innovation Award in the Artificial Intelligence category; at CES 2025, Samsung televisions were shown recognising a dish on screen and opening its recipe in the app.
Day to day, you save recipes from any website — via a phone share sheet, a Chrome extension or a pasted link — organise them, drag them onto a weekly plan, and convert a recipe or a whole plan into a grocery list sorted by aisle. Every recipe carries calories, detailed nutrition and a Health Score, and twelve diets are supported. AI runs underneath: OpenAI generates and adapts recipes and suggests substitutions, and detects ingredients in photos, while product data comes from the Open Food Facts database. On the business side, brands, retailers and publishers plug into the Open Food Profile, with Kroger, Sainsbury's, Amazon, Jamie Oliver and Betty Crocker among the named partners.
The limits are clear. The best AI features are marked exclusively on mobile app and the subscription cannot be bought from the web, the site claims 180,000+ recipes but publishes no API, and since 31 August 2023 the mobile app is no longer distributed in a list of countries, leaving browser access only.
What it does
- Save a recipe from any website, through a phone share sheet, the Chrome extension or a pasted link
- Build a weekly meal plan by dragging recipes onto the days, with notes, start dates and recurring meals
- Turn a single recipe or a whole plan into a grocery list in one click, sorted by aisle or by recipe
- Read calories, detailed nutritional values and a Health Score (GI/GL) on every recipe, including your own
- Have AI adapt a recipe: ingredient substitutions, balanced macros or a healthier variant
- Create and personalise your own recipes in the recipe builder
- Join or create public and private communities to share recipes, conversations, reviews and ratings
When to use Samsung Food / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Samsung Food is the right fit.
When to use Samsung Food
- Home cooks whose recipes are scattered across websites, screenshots and social feeds, and who want one searchable recipe box
- Households that plan the week together and want the grocery list built automatically from the meal plan
- People with health or dietary goals: calories, detailed nutrition and a Health Score (GI/GL) are attached to every recipe, and twelve diets are supported, from vegan and keto to Mediterranean, gluten free and dairy free
- Owners of Samsung hardware who want recipes wired into SmartThings ovens, a Family Hub fridge, Galaxy Watch and Samsung Health
- Food creators who share recipes and run public or private communities, with reviews, ratings and a Creator Academy behind them
When not to use Samsung Food
- Anyone under 18: clause 2.2.1 of the terms restricts accounts to adults
- People looking for clinical dietary guidance: the terms state that calorie counts, nutritional facts, allergen information and meal plans are not advice on which reliance should be placed
- Desktop-only cooks: the most useful AI features are marked exclusively on mobile app, and the Food+ subscription cannot be purchased from the web at all
- Users in the countries where the mobile app has not been distributed since 31 August 2023, unless browser-only access is acceptable
- Developers and professional kitchens: no public API or developer documentation is published, and the product is designed for households rather than food-service management
How to use Samsung Food
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account with an email address, or sign in with a Facebook, Google, Apple or Samsung account
- Choose your entry point: the iOS or Android app, the web app at app.samsungfood.com, or the Chrome extension on a desktop
- Set your preferences in Settings: dietary restrictions, allergies and disliked ingredients
- Enable the iOS or Android share extension so you can save a recipe straight from your phone browser or a social app
- Install the Chrome extension to save recipes while browsing on a computer
- To save from a link, copy the URL and open the app: the save option appears on its own
- Organise your recipe box, and use the recipe builder to create or edit recipes and swap ingredients
- Build the week in the meal planner by dragging recipes onto days, adding notes, start dates and recurring meals
- Generate the shopping list from a recipe (Save > Shopping List > Add items) or from the planner (+ > Add plan to shopping list), then share the link so others can view and edit it in real time
- If you want the Food+ features, open the mobile app and go to Settings > Start free trial; the subscription cannot be bought from the web
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The free tier covers the essentials: recipe saving, meal plans, grocery lists and communities cost nothing
- Recipes are captured from any website without retyping, and a recipe or plan becomes a sorted grocery list in one click
- Nutrition data and a Health Score are computed even for recipes you create yourself
- Strong contractual transparency: service providers listed with country and purpose, a published GDPR DPA, and a named Data Protection Officer
- Customer data is hosted on Google Cloud in UK data centres, with personal data stored within the EEA
- Independent recognition: Apple App of the Week, Google Play Best Everyday Essentials 2020, and a CES 2024 Innovation Award for AI; the App Store listing shows 4.78 across 6,301 ratings
- Backed by the Samsung group, with hardware integration and seven interface languages on the iOS app
Cons
- The most interesting AI features require Food+ and a mobile device: they are unavailable on the web
- The subscription itself cannot be purchased from the web app
- No documented way to exclude your data from technology improvement; the privacy policy states data is used to enhance their technologies through machine learning algorithms
- The mobile app has not been distributed in a list of countries since 31 August 2023, and users there also lose email and in-app communications
- No public API and no developer documentation
- No dedicated legal email address: everything goes through general support or a Zendesk form, and the DPO contact still points at the legacy domain support@whisk.com
- Retention is expressed as criteria rather than firm durations, and Food+ pricing varies by country because it is set by the app stores
Pricing & Plans
Samsung Food offers a free plan covering recipe saving, browsing more than 180,000 recipes, meal planning, grocery lists and communities. The paid tier, Samsung Food+, starts at USD 6.99 per month after a seven-day free trial, with an annual option at USD 59.99 per year advertised as a 28% saving. Both are sold only from the iOS or Android app; the publisher notes that plan details may differ according to your country, since prices follow the App Store and Google Play conversions. A subscription may be cancelled at any time and remains active until the end of the current billing cycle.
- Free — browse 180
- 000+ recipes
- save recipes
- join communities
- build meal plans and grocery lists
- at no cost
- Samsung Food+ Monthly — USD 6.99 per month after a 7-day free trial
- Samsung Food+ Annual — USD 59.99 per year after a 7-day free trial
- advertised as 28% cheaper than monthly
- Food+ exclusives
- mobile app only — AI-guided recipes
- saved meal plans
- AI recipe personalisation
- tailored 7-day meal plans
- search by food list
- automated pantry
- nutrition goal tracking and ad-free browsing
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Samsung Food handles your data.
GDPR overview
Foodient Ltd. is a UK company and its privacy policy is structured along GDPR lines; the current version was updated on 23 April 2026 and takes effect on 14 May 2026. It grants access, rectification or blocking, erasure, restriction, portability, objection and withdrawal of consent, while stating expressly that these rights are not absolute, and it points users to the regulator of their country of residence. The cookie policy cites Article 6(1)(f) for essential cookies and Article 6(1)(a) for the rest, and transfers outside the EEA rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. A GDPR Data Processing Addendum and a list of service providers are published in the help centre, and a Data Protection Officer is named. Account deletion is self-service and permanent. No Article 27 EU representative is designated anywhere on the site; a separate CCPA section covers California residents.
Who owns the data?
Foodient Ltd., a company registered in England and Wales under number 08001091, is the data controller for the processing of personal data. It has appointed a Data Protection Officer, Larisa Sheckler, contactable at support@whisk.com or by post at 483 Green Lanes, London N13 4BS. The terms describe material you upload as “Your Content” and warn that technical copies may be kept after it stops being displayed. Third-party accounts (Facebook, Google, Apple, Samsung Health) can be connected to sign in and share. Ownership of the publisher itself rests with Samsung Electronics Europe Holding Coöperatief U.A. of the Netherlands, filed at Companies House on 7 March 2019 as holder of 75% or more of the shares.
Reuse rights
The privacy policy lists eleven categories of data collected — personal details, profile, food preferences, usage, location, grocery, authentication, Samsung promotions, contacts, third-party accounts and behavioural data — processed on consent, legitimate interest or performance of the contract. Beyond running the service, the publisher states that it improves your experience by using your data to enhance its technologies, for example through machine learning algorithms, and that it profiles preferences using machine learning and other AI techniques. Health data is treated as special category data, requiring explicit consent that can be withdrawn through the DPO. Data is shared with published service providers, with partners such as retailers, recipe publishers, health apps and connected-device makers, with linked third-party accounts, and in the event of restructuring or a legal obligation; aggregated, anonymised trend reports also go to third parties. OpenAI is used to generate and adapt recipes and suggest ingredient substitutions, with AI-generated content flagged as such, and the terms state: “We do not intend to share your personal data with OpenAI.” No option to exclude your data from that technology improvement is documented.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The publisher states on its Security page that all customer data is stored in data centres located in the United Kingdom, on Google Cloud infrastructure, and the privacy policy adds that Google Cloud is engaged to store personal data within the European Economic Area. The published service provider list confirms the picture on the infrastructure side: Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. in Great Britain, Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany. Transfers to the United Kingdom and the United States are mentioned explicitly, framed by contractual safeguards, with the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses cited on the cookie page. Security measures described include TLS encryption in transit, authentication, regular backups and redundancy. Note that the website's own IP address sits on Cloudflare's anycast network and says nothing about where the data lives; the jurisdiction that matters here is the United Kingdom, with Germany as a secondary infrastructure location.
Where Samsung Food works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Samsung Food.
- Nutrition figures are not advice: the terms state that calorie counts, nutritional facts, allergen information and meal plans are not intended to amount to advice on which reliance should be placed
- AI-generated content is flagged, but substitutions and adapted recipes still need a human check before cooking, especially where allergens are involved
- Health data is sensitive data, processed on explicit consent; think before connecting Samsung Health or entering nutrition goals
- The privacy policy declares profiling by machine learning and other AI techniques, and the use of personal data to enhance the publisher's technologies, with no documented opt-out
- Clause 13.2.3 of the terms provides for commissions on purchases made with third parties from within the service, so recommendations are not necessarily neutral
- Community recipes are user-generated content: the publisher does not guarantee their quality, and delegating every meal decision to an algorithm quietly erodes your own cooking judgement
- Availability and price are not stable: the mobile app has been withdrawn from a list of countries since 31 August 2023, and Food+ pricing is set country by country by the app stores
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. There is nothing to install on a server and no API key to obtain: you create a free account, or sign in with a Facebook, Google, Apple or Samsung account, and start from the mobile app or the web app. Two optional steps take a minute each: enabling the iOS or Android share extension to save recipes from your phone, and installing the Chrome extension to save from a desktop browser. The only real prerequisite is hardware: the SmartThings, Family Hub and Samsung Health integrations assume you already own compatible Samsung devices.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Samsung Food
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Samsung Food free?
What is the relationship between Samsung Food and Whisk?
Who actually publishes the app?
Which platforms does it run on?
Which AI does Samsung Food use?
Is my data used to train models?
Where is the data hosted?
Is there a Data Processing Addendum?
Can I delete my account?
Is the app available everywhere?
Should you pick Samsung Food?
Samsung Food is a mature product wearing a young name: twelve years of engineering under two brands, backed by the Samsung group since 2019, with a free tier that is genuinely generous. Saving recipes from anywhere, weekly planning, grocery lists and communities all cost nothing. For a household that currently cooks from screenshots and open browser tabs, that alone justifies the account.
Two conditions decide whether the paid tier is worth it. First, nearly everything the AI does — guided recipes, tailored seven-day plans, cooking from what is already in the pantry, nutrition goal tracking — is reserved for Food+ and, on top of that, for the mobile app. If you cook from a laptop you are looking at a smaller product, and you cannot even subscribe from the web. Second, prices are set by the app stores and vary by country, so USD 6.99 per month is the figure shown for the United States, not a universal one.
On transparency the publisher does better than most: service providers listed with country and purpose, a published GDPR Data Processing Addendum, a named Data Protection Officer, and hosting on Google Cloud in UK data centres with personal data stored in the EEA. The counterweight is written into the privacy policy — personal data is used to enhance their technologies through machine learning algorithms, and no way to opt out of that is documented.
Check two things yourself before committing: whether your country is on the supported list for the mobile app, since distribution stopped in some markets on 31 August 2023, and what Food+ actually costs in your own store. And treat calorie counts, allergen data and AI-adapted recipes as a starting point: the terms are explicit that they are not advice on which reliance should be placed.
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