Meal prepping for the week should be simple: pick a few recipes, scale them to the right number of servings, go shopping. But in practice, it always turns into a mess of mental arithmetic and duplicate items scattered across three different lists.
The problem isn't that recipes are hard to scale. It's that most tools — even the good ones — stop at the recipe. They'll let you change the serving count and update the ingredient quantities. But the moment you have two or three recipes for the week, you're back to manually combining everything into one shopping list. Nobody fixed that part.
Here's a concrete example. You're scaling a chicken stir-fry recipe from 2 to 6 servings (a 3x multiplier) and adding a pasta dish that also calls for olive oil. A basic recipe multiplier gives you "3 tbsp olive oil" and "2 tbsp olive oil" on separate lines. You still have to add those together at the store.
And it gets messier. Recipes use inconsistent units — some call for cups, others use ounces, others list "1 can (14 oz)." A real recipe scaler needs to consolidate those intelligently, not just multiply numbers. The unit math alone is surprisingly involved.
Then there's the edge case everyone ignores: fractional servings. Scale a recipe by 2.5x and you get "0.625 tsp salt" — technically correct, useless in a kitchen. A good meal prep calculator rounds these to practical measurements while keeping the total quantities accurate enough to matter.
BatchList is a free recipe scaler that solves the whole problem, not just part of it:
No account needed. No app to download. Paste in, scale up, copy the list, go shop. That's it.
Most recipe apps are designed around the single-recipe experience: find a dish, cook it tonight, done. But batch cooking and meal prep are fundamentally multi-recipe workflows. You're optimizing a whole week, not a single meal. The shopping trip is the constraint — you want to buy everything once, efficiently, with no backtracking through the store.
That requires a different kind of tool. A recipe multiplier is table stakes. The real value is in what happens after scaling: consolidation, deduplication, and a clean list organized so you can move through the store without thinking.
We built BatchList because we couldn't find that tool. It's free, and it handles the math that was always annoying us.
Try it — paste a recipe and scale it in under 30 seconds.
Open BatchList →