Whole Foods Markets Recipes: There’s an app for that

When it comes to feeding your card carrying PETA (aka People for Eating Tasty Animals) friends, getting the menu together generally isn’t a problem. However, for the special needs folks—vegetarians and vegans and piscivores, oh my!—on your guest list, finding recipes and making the shopping list can be something of a challenge, especially for those of us for whom the journey away from our arboreal beginnings is a one way trip.

However, whether you’re planning a budget stretching meatless Monday menu or entertaining “meat is murder” friends and relatives, here’s one tool to rule them all—Whole Foods Market Recipes 1.0.1 (free, iTunes).

If you’d like to try something both delicious and healthy this holiday weekend, think about serving your guests Barbecue Glazed Alaska Salmon with Tomatillo Salsa Verde. That’s just one of the many tempting meals you can find in Whole Foods Market Recipes, a new, free app available on the App Store. The app, which requires iPhone OS 3.0, provides ingredients, directions, a store locator, and other handy features—Whole Foods Markets Recipes 1.0 teaser

See also:
— MacGourmet: One cookbook to rule them all

Yes, all that pro-meat snarkiness was unduly snarky, because Whole Foods is all about healthy foods, including “flesh.” Of course, you can find whole grain flax seed at your local Whole Foods store, but also organic meats and dairy, including the wild-caught Alaskan salmon needed for the recipe mentioned above.

Hands on

Whole Foods Markets Recipes is generally a thoughtful app with a feel and flavor similar to the company’s attractive website. Every recipe includes a description, nutritional info, ingredients list and concise, easy-to-follow directions.

Further, every recipe is coded (colored dots with letters) to indicate whether it’s gluten or dairy free, for example, as well as tags for low sodium, fat, etc. And, yes, there are plenty of recipes tagged vegetarian, too.

The downsides are that you must be running iPhone OS 3.0 and, at least on my first generation iPod touch, Whole Foods Markets Recipes crashed with some frequency. Thereupon, in order to browse all recipes, you can’t just tap browse—you have to search for all recipes—which is at least two taps too many. Moreover, every time I tried to scroll through a full listing of the available recipes, the app crashed.

Further, not all recipes have pictures and none includes how to illustrations or photos, let alone video (hello, Web 2.0!), which are major impediments to answering the question, “Am I doing this right?” Also, there’s no way to manually add recipes or photos on your own, or annotate existing recipes.

To their credit, it seems that all of the recipes in the app (I only checked a handful) are also listed on the Whole Foods website, which is easier to navigate and is more complete.

All-in-all Whole Foods Market Recipe 1.0.1 is a freshman effort and, in addition to an effective way to browse available recipes, needs to be tied more closely the Whole Foods website (ie for completeness, ease-of-use) and needs user customizable features, like notes and the ability to add/edit recipes. Still, the price is right…

What’s your take?

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1. Top 10 best free iPhone and iPod Touch recipe apps
2. Welcome to the dawn of the iPhone mom