Need Equivalent Units for Each Food and Smarter Shopping Lists

[jptemplin]

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The shopping list does not combine a food ingredient if they are in different units in different recipes.

Please provide a concise description of the feature that would resolve your issue.

For example, butter can be measured in many ways:

• Pounds/fractions of a pound/ounces
• Grams
• Sticks
• Tablespoons
• Cups/fractions of a cup

Other recipe programs like MasterCook and Living Cookbook solve this problem by having units and measures for each food ingredient rather than a single global units tables like in Mealie. Attached is an example of the measures screen in Living Cookbook for butter. Note how each measure is listed as its equivalent grams which makes combining different measures of an ingredient possible. Once the ingredients are added up (in this case by equivalent grams), Living Cookbook lists the sum as the closest largest measure (instead of 908 grams, 2 pounds will go into the shopping list).

There are similar examples in other baking recipes where ingredients are measurable in volume or weight: sugar, flour, liquids like milk, etc.

Please consider and list out some caveats or tradeoffs made in your design decision

This adds complexity to adding/maintaining food items, but once you take the time to add common measures to each, you get more accurate and concise shopping lists. In my use case, I'm building a shopping list of a dozen different Christmas cookie recipes, each recipe uses different measures for butter. Mealie would still force me to do the arithmetic to combine the separate shopping list entries (because it can't combine the disparate units) which negates a key benefit of building shopping lists.

Additional Information

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[shoneg]

I really support this request. In addition, I would suggest giving two options for the conversion. Firstly, it should be possible to give conversions on the ingredients themselves, as suggested above (this should of course be optional). Secondly, it should be possible to give conversions on the units. For example, in my cookbook there are the units kilogram and gram. Here it would be useful to give the conversion of x1000 once on the units, so that I don't have to give it for every ingredient that can be measured in g or kg.

[jptemplin]

Yes, the "standard ones" should be built-in, e.g., teaspoons => tablespoons => cups => pints => quarts => gallons, then all those to fluid ounces. Plus grams => kilograms as mention by @shoneg. And of course ounces => pounds.

In the Living Cookbook example, I didn't need to enter every possible measure because the program could compute all the others as needed using the built-in standard measures.