To give my campers and staff the best dining experience possible, I made it a policy to prepare our camp meals with more of a home-cooked flavor, using some of my family’s favorite recipes.

In the earlier years of my camp food service experience, I referenced conversion tables in books such as the classic Food for Fifty and personally upscaled my recipes by hand. Today there are plenty of online recipe conversion sites and apps to help you. The following are my reviews of some of the conversion aids currently available to food service staff.

Tool One: Digital Recipe Converters

WEBstaurant Resizer

This recipe converter requires each ingredient and unit to be entered separately, so this app can be very time-consuming for scaling recipes. However, the converter’s host site, WEBstaurant Store (2025), is an online store, and once you enter your ingredients, the site offers selections of relevant products for discounted prices for those interested in ordering. 

Good Calculators

Good Calculators (2025) is a calculating site that can tally a variety of things, including income tax, overtime pay, and water intake! The site’s recipe scaler allows you to copy and paste your ingredient list into the recipe field, instead of manually entering the ingredients individually, which saves a great deal of time.

Good Calculators also features an all-purpose Cooking Measurement Conversion Calculator that permits you to enter the value of a specific ingredient and convert to whichever type of measurement you need, such as two pints to fluid ounces. While it would be beneficial if the site had an option to convert all ingredients to another unit of measurement simultaneously, this is an excellent resource for converting tablespoons to cups, ounces to pints, cups to pounds, etc. It has virtually any type of measurement you need for conversions, including imperial system measurements still used by the United States today, and metric system measurements used by other countries around the world. 

Measurement Information

For more information on the imperial and metric systems measurements, refer to opentextbc.ca (BC Cook Articulation Committee, 2015).

My Kitchen Calculator

My Kitchen Calculator (MKC; 2020) also accepts a copied-and-pasted ingredient list for recipe conversion. Successful use of this app relies on ingredients being listed on separate lines and with the exact number of ingredients. For example, list “2 cups of milk” instead of “2 to 3 (or 2–3) cups of milk.” Items listed in less specific ways won’t convert properly.
The app allows you to “convert by multiplier” or “convert by portion.” MKC includes a tutorial and a “Print Recipe” option. 

Baking Calculators’ Recipe Resizer

As the name suggests, Baking Calculators (2025) is a site that specifically applies to conversions for baked goods. Ingredients listed on separate lines are also a requirement on this site. 

RandomRecipe Generator 

A premium attraction to the Random Recipe Generator site (n.d.) is a Recipe Converter that allows you to paste a complete recipe URL into the conversion field. After doing this, just click on the minus sign or plus sign by the original serving number to decrease or increase the amount to the number of servings you need.

The caveat to this and all the preceding conversion sites/apps is that each one only uses the exact type of cooking measurements listed in the original recipe, making it more conducive to smaller recipe scaling. For example, when I pasted a gluten-free banana bread recipe URL into the ingredient field, which originally listed 1 ½ cups all-purpose gluten-free flour, the conversion to 96 servings yielded 18 cups of the gluten-free flour, instead of converting it to 5 pounds.

KitchenAid Blog

KitchenAid has a "Butter Measurement & Conversion: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet" (2024), which I have personally found helpful in some of my upscaled recipes. 

Tool Two: A Recipe Conversion Chart

I have learned that while online conversion apps are invaluable for substituting exact unit-for-unit measurements, they are nearly impossible to use for converting one type of unit to another with a specific ingredient. This is where a printed, comprehensive chart is a necessity for quick reference in your camp kitchen. Check out Melissa’s Southern Style Kitchen for a free, printable kitchen conversion chart (Sperka, 2023).

Tool Three: A Recipes Converted Template

Over the years I have kept a digital copy of each camp recipe we used historically or newly created. Camp Gilmont, where I last served, offered more homemade-style foods instead of frozen, parbaked offerings. Smaller in size than my previous camp, we served fewer guests and staff — which made it easier to convert recipes. After all, it is easier to convert recipes for up to 150 than it is for up to 600.

On each template spreadsheet, I posted: 

• Column A — the original recipe ingredient amount
• Column B — the ingredient list
• Column C — doubled amounts
• Column D — tripled units
• Column E — quadrupled quantities

My converted recipe template is more utilitarian than artistic, but here you will see this pragmatic example via my own King Ranch Chicken Casserole recipe.

A Caveat

Finally, while the tools presented are useful, know that there are recipe ingredients that are not always well suited for exact conversions to large quantities. Some of these are: 

• Spices
• Herbs
• Salt
• Yeast
• Leavening agents such as baking powder and soda
• Fresh aromatics such as fresh herbs, vinegars, and citrus zest

Imitation vanilla can lead to a very different result than authentic vanilla, especially varieties from other regions, like Mexico. Also, note that a recipe converted by substituting sugar for corn syrup, corn starch for tapioca starch, and all-purpose flour for gluten-free flour is always subject to changing the taste and/or texture of the final product (Lebovitz, 2010). Sometimes it can take trial and error to convert a recipe to a point of satisfaction and comparable taste.

References

• Baking Calculators. (2025). Recipe resizer. bakingcalculators.com/resizerecipe/Default.aspx#google_vignette
• BC Cook Articulation Committee. (2015). Basic kitchen and food service management: Imperial and US systems of measurement. opentextbc.ca/basickitchenandfood-servicemanagement/chapter/imperial-and-u-s-systems-of-measurement/
• Good Calculators. (2025). Recipe scaler. goodcalculators.com/recipe-scaler/
• KitchenAid. (2024). Butter measurement & conversion: The ultimate cheat sheet. kitchenaid.ca/en_ca/blog/s/butter-measurement-conversion.html
• Lebovitz, D. (2010, August 17). Baking ingredients and substitutions. davidlebovitz.com/baking-ingredients-and-food-substitutions/
• Sperka, M. (2023, September 8). Free printable kitchen conversion chart. Melissa’s Southern Style Kitchen. melissassouthernstylekitchen.com/free-printable-kitchen-conversion-chart/
• MyKitchenCalculator.com. (2020). Recipe converter. mykitchencalculator.com/recipeconverter.html
• Random Recipe Generator. (n.d.) Recipe converter. recipescal.com/recipe-converter
• WEBstaurantStore. (2025). Resizer. webstaurantstore.com/recipe_resizer.html

Kimberly Whiteside Truitt is a former food service manager at Camp Gilmont and Camp Zephyr and has served on Camping Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Committee. Kimberly was a presenter at the 2018, 2020, and 2023 North American Food Service and Maintenance Conferences.