A couple of months ago, Apple launched a new service as part of their news subscription called News+ Food. The additional app functionality appears in the News+ app, bringing together recipes from around the different outlets that appear in the News app, and allows you to save any recipes you might find. As with other recipe apps, it then allows you to make sure you’ve got all the ingredients available, and then follow along as you cook with an easy view within the app.

I like this as a concept but it feels quite clunky, even for a new service. First it doesn’t feel like News is a natural place for this. At one point I completely forgot how to even find the recipes again, realising they were tucked away under the Following tab with very little fanfare. As a lot of the content is coming from newspapers and magazines that are featured in the News app, I can see why they’ve done it this way, but when you step back and think about it, it doesn’t really make sense.

There aren’t a huge amount of recipes I’ve found that I’d want to try, but I’ve saved a few and the interface for this is pretty good. I do particularly like that when you’re in cooking mode, the instructions are big and scrollable and more importantly, you can tap on an ingredient to see how much of it you should be using. It’s been a frustration of mine that in my chosen non-Apple recipe app, you have to switch back and forth between ingredients and method regularly.

News+ Food also integrates very well with the inbuilt timer app so you can quickly tap the recipe to set the specified time and just carry on. The ideas and the functionality are there, and when it was first launched I was quite excited about it. But it doesn’t seem like the take-up is particularly good and I always forget to check back in to News, where as I’ve said, my head doesn’t naturally think oh yea, my recipes are in there.

I hope this is a situation where improvements are made and the idea grows rather than being ditched altogether because there are some good features and the links to the existing Apple products give it that point of difference, but I think more work is required to make this a hit.