Samsung Food (Whisk) vs Cook: Free, but What Happens to Your Data?

We make Cook, so we have a stake in this — but the comparison below is a fair one. Samsung Food (the app formerly known as Whisk, acquired by Samsung in 2019 and rebranded in 2023) is capable and popular, and for a lot of people "free and good enough" is the right call. The honest question is what "free" actually costs.

The short version

  • Choose Samsung Food if free matters most, you want a big recipe library and social/community features, and you're comfortable with a major platform holding your recipe and cooking data.
  • Choose Cook if you'd rather pay a little to keep your recipes as plain-text files you own, with no ads and no data-driven business model — plus an AI that plans from your own collection.

The decision really comes down to one trade: free-but-data-driven versus paid-but-yours.

What Samsung Food does well

Samsung Food is a polished, free package: save recipes from across the web, plan meals, build shopping lists, and use AI features to personalise suggestions. It has a large community and recipe library, works across platforms, and ties into Samsung's wider ecosystem. If you want a no-cost meal planner with plenty of features and don't mind where the data goes, it delivers.

The catch with "free"

Free consumer apps are rarely free to run, and they're typically monetised the same way: through your data and attention. Samsung is an advertising and devices business, and a free recipe app that knows what you cook, buy, and eat is a valuable signal inside that ecosystem. None of that is hidden or unusual — it's the standard model — but it's worth being clear-eyed about:

  • Your recipes and meal-planning behaviour live in Samsung's account system, not in files you control.
  • The product can change — features, terms, monetisation — on the platform's schedule, not yours.
  • Getting your collection out in a clean, portable form is rarely as easy as it should be.

If you're fine with that trade, Samsung Food is a strong free option. If it gives you pause, that's where Cook differs.

How Cook is different

Cook's model is the opposite: a small subscription for the cloud and AI, and in exchange your data is genuinely yours. Every recipe is a plain-text .cook file, every meal plan a plain-text .menu file. You can read, back up, and move them anywhere; sync them without lock-in through Cook Cloud or your own folder (Dropbox, Nextcloud, your server). Leave Cook and your collection comes with you, unchanged.

You still get the modern features: CookBot plans your week from your own recipes, balances and reuses ingredients to cut waste, and generates one aisle-grouped shopping list covering every meal. New to Cook? The Kickstart service seeds your collection with fifteen well-loved recipes. The difference is that none of it is paid for by mining what you cook.

The honest trade-off

Samsung Food wins on price — it's free, and Cook isn't. If zero cost is the deciding factor, that's a real point in its favour. What you give up is ownership and a clear, ad-free, non-data-driven relationship with your recipes. Cook charges for exactly that: your data stays yours, and you're the customer, not the product.

Try Cook

See how it feels to own your collection: plan a week with CookBot, seed it with Kickstart, and check pricing. More on the philosophy in recipe sync without lock-in, and if you're comparing other tools, Paprika vs Cook.