Take a Photo of Your Fridge and Get Recipes You Can Cook Tonight

The idea is simple: take a photo of your fridge and get recipes for what’s in it. No typing, no scrolling through a recipe site with a pepper in one hand. Until recently the tools that promised this mostly did one thing, which was to invent a brand-new recipe from whatever the camera saw. That’s fine once. It’s less useful on a Tuesday, when what you want is something you already know you like.

This guide shows how the fridge photo works in Pluck, where it looks through your own saved recipes first and only creates a new one when nothing fits. It also covers what the camera can and can’t see, what happens to the photo, and what it costs.

Why a fridge photo beats a search box

Searching recipes by ingredient is an old idea, and it works. We wrote a whole guide to it: what can I cook with what I have. The weak point was always the input. You stand at the fridge, type “spinach”, “feta”, “eggs”, forget the half lemon, and miss the jar of chickpeas behind the milk.

A photo fixes the input, not the search. The camera sees the whole shelf at once, including the things you’ve stopped noticing. Everything after that is the same search as before, just filled in for you.

How to do it

1. Scan

Open What can I cook? in Pluck and tap Scan ingredients. Take a photo or choose one from your library. One scan can hold up to three photos, because a fridge is rarely one shot: a shelf, the door and whatever is on the worktop.

2. Check what it found

After a few seconds the ingredients appear as chips, the same chips you would get by typing. Three things are worth knowing:

• Chips from the photo are marked with a small camera badge, so you can tell them from ones you typed.
• Anything Pluck isn’t sure about has a dashed outline and a question mark. It stays out of the search until you tap to confirm it. A jar with no visible label is a typical case.
• You can remove any chip, and add what it missed by typing as usual.

Your photos add to the ingredients you already entered. They never replace them.

3. See what you can cook

The search runs on its own once the chips are in. Pluck ranks the recipes in your recipe box by how much of each you already have:

Recipe	What you’d need
Spinach and feta frittata	Can make now
Lemony chickpea traybake	Missing 1: red onion
Shakshuka	Missing 2: tomatoes, onion

Everyday staples like salt, oil and pepper don’t count as missing, so a recipe isn’t pushed down the list for needing a pinch of salt. Use the Can make now filter if you don’t want to go to the store at all.

These are recipes you saved because you wanted to cook them: the pasta from a TikTok, the traybake from a food blog, your aunt’s soup from a photo of her handwritten card. That’s the difference from a recipe generator. The answer comes from your own taste, not from a database.

4. Nothing fits? Create one

Some nights the fridge and your recipe box don’t overlap. When no saved recipe is close, Pluck offers Create a recipe with these. You can pick a meal type, set a time limit and add a note such as “one pan, no oven”.

The new recipe uses mainly what you have, plus common staples. It may add up to three other ingredients, and those are flagged as things you may need to buy. It opens for review before anything is saved, and it’s labelled AI-created, with a reminder to check quantities and cooking times before you cook. Recipes from a creator and recipes from the app never get mixed up in your recipe box.

What the camera can and can’t see

A photo is a good list-maker and a poor inspector. To get a clean scan:

• Turn on the light and open the drawers. The vegetable drawer is where most of the dinner is.
• Turn labels to the front. A tin with its label showing is “chopped tomatoes”. A tin from the side is a tin.
• Use separate shots for the shelf, the door and the worktop instead of one photo from across the kitchen.
• Check the uncertain chips. They take two seconds to confirm, and they decide whether a recipe shows up as “can make now”.

What it can’t do: see inside an opaque container, tell how much is left in a carton, or know that the yoghurt went off last week. Treat the result as a head start, not an inventory. If an inventory is what you want, Samsung Food has one: its Food List is a pantry you keep stocked, and Food+ adds recipe search by it. Pluck’s scan is a photo at the moment you cook, with nothing to maintain.

What happens to the photo

The photos are used to find ingredients and then deleted, as soon as detection finishes and whether or not it worked. They aren’t attached to a recipe, shown again or kept for training. If you cancel while Pluck is still looking, the upload is deleted and the scan isn’t counted. More on how Pluck handles your data is in the privacy policy.

What it costs

Typed search in “What can I cook?” is free and unlimited on every plan, and that hasn’t changed. The photo scan uses AI vision, so it has a monthly allowance:

Plan	Photo scans a month
Free	1
Light	5
Plus	50
Pro	100

A scan with three photos counts as one. Creating a new recipe counts as one of your monthly recipe extractions, and only when a recipe actually comes back.

When to type and when to scan

• Type when you have three things in mind and want an answer in ten seconds. It’s free and unlimited.
• Scan when the fridge is full of odds and ends, when you’re clearing it before a trip, or when you honestly don’t know what’s in there.

Either way, the search is only as good as the recipes you’ve saved. If your recipe box is thin, start there: save the recipes you keep bookmarking and the fridge photo has something to work with. Once you’ve cooked a few, the cooking log shows what you actually make, which is a good hint about what to keep buying.

The short answer

Yes, you can take a photo of your fridge and get recipes. The useful version looks through recipes you already wanted to make, shows what you’re missing for each, and creates something new only when it has to. The photo saves the typing. The recipe box is what makes the answer worth cooking.

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Pluck is available on iOS and Android. Get it on Google Play or on the App Store. Questions about plans and limits? See our Help & FAQ.