Understanding Recipe Data Formats
Your recipe collection is valuable. Whether it's 50 family recipes or 5,000 curated discoveries, the format your recipes are stored in determines whether you can move them freely between apps — or whether they're locked in forever. Here's a guide to the formats that matter.
The Open Standards
These formats are defined by public specifications that anyone can implement. They're the best guarantee that your recipes will be readable by future apps.
Schema.org Recipe (JSON-LD)
The gold standard for recipe data on the web. Schema.org is a vocabulary maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex that defines exactly how to describe a recipe: name, ingredients, instructions, prep time, cook time, nutrition, images, and more.
JSON-LD is the recommended way to embed Schema.org data in web pages. It's what enables Google's rich recipe cards in search results, and it's what recipe apps read when you import from a URL. Nearly every major food blog uses it.
Best for: Web publishing, app interoperability, long-term portability
Used by: FlourPower, MoveMyRecipes, Google, every major food blog
CookLang
CookLang is a newer, developer-friendly format that uses a plain-text markup language. Ingredients are marked with @, equipment with #, and timers with ~. It's designed to be readable as both a recipe and a structured data format.
Example: Add @salt{1%tsp} and @pepper{1/2%tsp} to the #pot{} and cook for ~{15%minutes}.
Best for: Developers, plain-text recipe management, version control
Used by: CookLang apps, MoveMyRecipes (export)
Open Recipe Format (YAML)
A YAML-based format designed for human readability and machine parsing. It's less widely adopted than JSON-LD but offers a clean, easy-to-edit structure for recipe collections.
Best for: Plain-text recipe management, manual editing
Used by: MoveMyRecipes (export), some self-hosted recipe tools
The Legacy Formats
These formats were important in earlier eras of digital recipe management but are rarely used for new projects.
RecipeML (XML)
An XML-based format from the early 2000s. It defined a detailed schema for recipes, including ingredients with quantities, preparation steps, and source information. While technically sound, it never achieved widespread adoption outside of desktop recipe software.
Meal-Master Format (.mmf)
One of the oldest digital recipe formats, dating back to DOS-era recipe software. It uses a fixed-width text format with specific column positions for quantities, units, and ingredient names. Some desktop apps like Paprika can still import this format.
MasterCook (.mx2, .mxp)
Proprietary XML-based format from the MasterCook software. Still in use by legacy MasterCook users and supported as an import format by some apps.
The Proprietary Formats
These formats are controlled by specific companies. They work well within their own ecosystem but create lock-in by making it difficult to move your data elsewhere.
Paprika (.paprikarecipes)
Paprika's export format bundles recipes into a compressed file. The internal format is relatively well-understood, and tools like MoveMyRecipes and FlourPower can read it. But it's controlled by a single company, and there's no guarantee of future compatibility.
Cook'n (.dvo)
Cook'n's proprietary format. Supported by MoveMyRecipes for conversion, but not widely interoperable.
CopyMeThat (HTML ZIP)
CopyMeThat exports recipes as an HTML file in a ZIP archive. The HTML is human-readable but not structured for machine parsing — recipe apps need custom parsers to extract the data. FlourPower and MoveMyRecipes both support this format.
The "Not Really a Format" Formats
PDFs are great for printing but terrible for data. A recipe in PDF is essentially a picture of text — there's no structured ingredient list, no machine-readable cooking times, and no way for an app to import it without AI-powered text extraction (OCR). FlourPower's Premium tier can extract recipes from PDFs using AI, but information loss is inevitable compared to importing from a structured format.
Screenshots and Photos
The most common "format" for saving recipes from social media. A photo of a recipe is useful for humans but opaque to computers. AI-powered OCR (like FlourPower Premium offers) can extract text from recipe photos, but it's always a best-effort process compared to structured data.
Plain Text / Copy-Paste
Copying recipe text from a website or document preserves the words but loses all structure. An app can't reliably distinguish ingredients from instructions from headnotes without AI assistance.
What This Means for Your Recipe Collection
Best Portability
Schema.org JSON-LD — the universal standard. Any app that supports it can import your recipes perfectly.
Acceptable Portability
Proprietary formats with known structure (Paprika, Cook'n, CopyMeThat) — tools like MoveMyRecipes can convert them.
Poor Portability
PDF, screenshots, apps with no export — your recipes are effectively trapped unless you use AI extraction.
FlourPower's Approach
FlourPower is built on the principle that your recipes should be portable. We support:
- Import from: URLs (JSON-LD), JSON files, Paprika exports, CopyMeThat exports, Pepperplate exports, photos, PDFs, and more
- Export to: Schema.org JSON, PDF — standard formats that any app can read
- Migration: Works seamlessly with MoveMyRecipes.com for converting from other apps
When you choose FlourPower, you're choosing an app that will never hold your recipes hostage.
Your Recipes, in Formats That Last
Import from anywhere, export in open standards. FlourPower keeps your recipe collection truly portable.