AI Use Case: How I Determined Calories and Macronutrients in a Favourite Recipe

 AI is a hot topic these days. While I have worries on the negative impacts it may have by reducing jobs, I’ve been exploring different AI use cases in the kitchen, and I recently stumbled across one that’s genuinely helpful.

A “use case,” for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is simply a practical application of AI to address a specific need. If you're like me, you probably enjoy homemade food but may want to keep track of your calories and macronutrients. It’s easy with store-bought products that have nutrition labels, but much harder with home cooking—even though homemade meals are often healthier and less processed.

In the past, I would google every ingredient in a recipe, look up its calories and macronutrients, add everything together manually, and then divide by the number of servings. I’d often do this while something was already in the oven and I was tired from cooking. The whole process could take up to 20 minutes.

The other day, I wondered: "What if I just loaded the recipe into ChatGPT and asked it to do the math for me?" It produced a clean, easy-to-read table in under a minute. Now I can track my meals in my food diary much easier.

It worked when I copied and pasted the recipe, when I took a picture of the recipe, when I used a screenshot, and sometimes even when I provided only the recipe link (depending on the site's permissions). I can also tell it about substitutions or modifications I made, and it incorporates those into the calculations.

Here’s an example, using a recipe I wrote about in a previous post: Cure-a-Cold Chicken Noodle Soup.

Prompt:
Can you calculate the calories and macronutrients in the following recipe by creating a table? Also, I'll be splitting this four ways so can you please determine the per serving calories and macronutrients?
https://www.everydaycookingadventures.com/rachael-rays-cure-a-cold-chicken-noodle-soup/

And here is the final output after a quick clarification:

If you want to see the full breakdown of how the numbers were calculated, you can ask ChatGPT for that too:

Even if some estimates aren’t perfect, they’re more than good enough to point you in the right direction. I wanted to share this because it’s a great time-saving hack—and a simple way to better understand the health profile of your homemade recipes.