Product & apps
WFD vs Samsung Food: what happened to Whisk
Whisk earned a loyal following, then became Samsung Food. Reviewers describe lost family sharing, diet ads and a weekly plan couples still can't share. WFD is built for the household, by a household.
Disclosure first: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD). Samsung Food used to be Whisk, an independent recipe saver with a genuinely loyal following. Samsung acquired it in 2019 and rebranded it in August 2023, and it now ships across Galaxy devices in over a hundred countries. Of all the big meal apps, it looks the most household ready on paper: recipe sharing, shared shopping lists, a meal planner.
Then you read the reviews. Everything quoted below is public and dated; the pattern we see across it is our opinion.
Users say the household features went backwards
The sharpest complaints are from families who had a workflow and lost it. A Google Play reviewer wrote in May 2026 that their family "used to be able to sign in on multiple devices, so whichever family member was cooking for the night, all had the same meal plan, but now you all have to have separate accounts." An App Store reviewer planning meals with her boyfriend reports being able to share recipes and shopping lists, but "we can't share our weekly meal plans." The one thing a household most needs to see together, the week itself, is the thing that stays private to each account.
Sign in draws its own complaints: a thread on Samsung's own community forum describes the app refusing to create an account unless the poster entered their Samsung login. And the free tier carries advertising; Android Authority's January 2025 review describes "strange food- and diet-related ads" promoting eating plans from other services, with removal requiring the premium subscription.
Longtime users also describe a trust problem with the data itself, in reviews dating back to the app's Whisk days. One found that changing the servings on a recipe does not carry the adjusted amounts into the shopping list, "so shopping off that list will get you the wrong ingredient amounts." Another watched the app silently rewrite a saved pie crust recipe, turning a range of six to eight tablespoons of cold water into a flat six. Coconut milk gets filed under dairy and eggs. And the browser extension for clipping recipes, a core Whisk feature, has reviews describing it as broken since the 2023 rebrand, a spinning wheel that never resolves, with fresh one star reports as recently as April 2026.
What changed underneath
Whisk's customer was the person using it. After the acquisition it sat inside a very large company's ecosystem strategy, and to us the reviews above read like the consequences: accounts that serve the ecosystem, ads that serve the revenue line, bugs that reviewers say sat unfixed through multiple updates. This is a pattern with a track record. Yummly, another big name planner, was owned by Whirlpool; it was shut down entirely at the end of 2024.
None of the people in those reviews did anything wrong. They picked a good app, and then its owner's priorities moved.
WFD is built the other way up
WFD is made by a couple, in the UK, and the household is the entire product rather than a feature on a list. There is nothing to bolt on because sharing is the mechanic itself: everyone swipes on meals on their own phone, with their own account, and a mutual match decides dinner. Matches build one weekly plan that everyone in the household sees, and the plan builds one shared shopping list that updates when the week changes. The thing Samsung Food's couples say they still cannot do is the first thing WFD ever did.
The money side is deliberately boring. Free to download, always usable free, one optional subscription for the full feature set, and that is the whole business model. No ads for other people's diet plans in the space where your family decides what to eat.
| What's For Dinner?! (WFD) | Samsung Food | |
|---|---|---|
| Shared weekly plan | Yes, one plan the whole household sees | Reviewers report plans can't be shared between accounts |
| How dinner gets decided | Everyone swipes, a mutual match decides | You save and pick; deciding stays manual |
| Accounts | Your own account, per person, that's it | A Samsung forum thread describes being unable to register without a Samsung login |
| Free tier | Fully usable, no ads | Ad supported, reviews mention diet ads |
| Who owns it | A couple in the UK | Samsung |
If your household runs on Samsung Food and it works, keep it. If you are a couple or family who mainly needs the week decided together and visible to everyone, that is the exact problem WFD exists for, and here is how it works for two. And if Samsung Food ships the shared weekly plan its couples keep asking for, we want to know, and we will say so here.