How to Save Recipes from AllRecipes, Yummly & Food52 (Before the Paywall Changes)

The Dedicated Recipe App Problem

AllRecipes has around 50 million registered users. Yummly, at its peak, had 35 million. Food52 built one of the most respected recipe communities on the internet. These platforms exist specifically to help people find, save and organise recipes. They are good at it. The collection you build inside one of them — a Saved folder with four years of weeknight dinners, a Friday Night Pasta board, a list of cakes you want to bake — is genuinely useful.

It is also not yours. It is inside their platform, governed by their terms, accessible only while your account is active and the company’s product decisions remain favourable. That distinction between “saved” and “owned” is worth taking seriously on a platform where the business model has changed multiple times in the past five years.

AllRecipes: 50 Million Users, Zero Export Button

AllRecipes is the largest recipe website in the United States. It has been owned by Dotdash Meredith since 2012 and generates significant advertising revenue — recipe pages are some of the most heavily monetised editorial content on the internet, with video autoplay, multiple ad units per scroll, and jump-to-recipe buttons that feel like UX but function as ad-unit bypass mitigation.

The Save function on AllRecipes requires a free account. Once you have one, you can build recipe boxes, save favourites, and create custom collections. This works well. What does not exist is any way to get that collection out of AllRecipes. There is no export to PDF, no data download, no bulk backup. A saved AllRecipes recipe is saved inside AllRecipes.

The practical risk is compounded by AllRecipes’ business trajectory. Dotdash Meredith has been consolidating its food brands — AllRecipes, Food & Wine, EatingWell — under shared infrastructure and experimenting with account-gated content. The current free access to saved recipes is a product decision, not a permanent guarantee. Given the ad-revenue pressure on editorial food content generally, treating a saved AllRecipes collection as stable long-term storage is optimistic.

Yummly: When the Free Tier Shrinks

Yummly was acquired by Whirlpool Corporation in 2017 — not a move that suggested recipe-first product thinking. The acquisition was about smart appliance integration: a Whirlpool oven that could receive a recipe from Yummly and pre-heat to the right temperature. The recipe library was the vehicle, not the point.

Over time, features that were free in the early Yummly era moved behind Yummly Pro: advanced meal planning, smart shopping lists with nutritional matching, personalised recipe feeds calibrated to dietary restrictions. Users who built recipe libraries during the pre-acquisition period found their collection intact but certain interactions with it behind a paywall.

Individual Yummly recipe pages remain publicly accessible by URL, which means Pantree’s URL import still works. But the collection you built inside Yummly — the saved recipes, the meal plans, the custom boxes — has no export path. If you cancel a Pro subscription or if Whirlpool’s product strategy shifts again, the collection stays inside Yummly.

Food52: A Shifting Subscription Model

Food52 is a different kind of platform — editorially driven, with staff-developed and community-tested recipes, a cookware shop, and a strong editorial voice. Its recipe quality is higher and more consistent than AllRecipes by design. It is also a company that has restructured its business model multiple times since its 2009 founding.

Food52 introduced a paid membership tier, restructured it, removed certain benefits, added others. The Recipes box — where your saved recipes live — has been available to free accounts throughout these changes, but the consistency of that access over a ten-year horizon is not guaranteed by anything other than current product decisions. Food52 received a $110 million investment round in 2022 that accelerated its commerce ambitions — the recipe library is increasingly a discovery funnel for the shop, not the end product.

As with AllRecipes: the recipes are good, the platform is useful, and the collection you build there is genuinely valuable. It just requires a second copy somewhere you control.

Epicurious and the Condé Nast Recipe Vault

Epicurious is the longest-running major recipe website in the US, launched in 1995. It draws from Bon Appétit, Gourmet (now defunct but archived), and Condé Nast Traveler. The recipes are professionally tested to a magazine standard and are among the most reliable freely-accessible recipes online.

Epicurious has a Save function and a recipe box. It does not have an export function. It also has a complex relationship with the broader Condé Nast digital strategy — the same editorial consolidation that killed Gourmet and periodically restructuresBon Appétit’s digital presence could, at some point, affect Epicurious. Its archive is the more pressing concern: recipes from the early-internet era occasionally go dead as the URL structure is updated. A recipe you saved to your Epicurious box two years ago links to a live page today. Whether it does in five years is less certain.

Paprika: The Honourable Exception

Paprika Recipe Manager is worth naming separately because it does the one thing every other platform on this list refuses to do: it lets you own your data. Recipes in Paprika are stored locally on your device, not on a company server. The app exports a .paprikarecipes file — a portable backup that any future version of Paprika (or compatible apps) can import. If you stop paying for Paprika, your recipe file remains usable on whatever device it is stored on.

Paprika also has no discovery layer, no community, and a one-time purchase model that means the company has limited ongoing revenue incentive. Whether Paprika continues to receive updates long-term is an open question. But as a data-ownership model for recipe storage, it is the right approach — and the closest equivalent to what Pantree does on iOS.

How to Get Your Recipes Out of Recipe Apps

For any individual recipe on AllRecipes, Yummly, Food52, Epicurious, or most other recipe websites: the URL import in Pantree is the fastest route. Open Pantree, tap +, select Import from URL, paste the recipe page URL. Pantree fetches the structured recipe data — ingredients, quantities, steps, serving size — and saves it as a clean, portable entry in your own library. This takes about fifteen seconds per recipe.

For an existing saved collection in AllRecipes or Food52, the most time-efficient approach is to work through your collection in batches: open each saved recipe in a browser tab, copy the URL, and paste it into Pantree. For a collection of fifty recipes, this takes roughly thirty to forty minutes done in one sitting. Annoying but finite — and the result is a library you own.

For recipes from mobile apps where the URL is not immediately obvious: most major recipe apps surface a Share button on each recipe page. Tapping Share on an AllRecipes recipe page gives you a shareable URL. Paste that into Pantree. For app-only content that does not generate a shareable link, a screenshot of the full recipe and Pantree’s camera import reconstructs the structure from the image.

The Underlying Pattern

The recipe fragmentation problem exists in two forms. The obvious form is recipes scattered across TikTok, email newsletters, a camera roll full of screenshots and thirty open browser tabs. The subtler form is what happens when you solve that problem by consolidating everything into a single dedicated platform — and that platform turns out to be someone else’s business, with someone else’s incentives.

AllRecipes, Yummly, Food52, and Epicurious are good products. Using them for discovery, community, and inspiration is entirely reasonable. Using them as the single authoritative home for recipes you want to cook for the next twenty years is a different proposition.

The fix is not to stop using them. It is to build a second copy, in a library you control, every time you save something worth keeping. Fifteen seconds per recipe, done as you go. Cheaper than rediscovering the same recipe for the third time after the original link goes dead.

Frequently Asked Questions