The Astonishing Amount America's Test Kitchen Spends While Creating Recipes

Chef writing a recipe next to dough and eggs

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America’s Test Kitchen has been one of the most trusted and influential cooking resources in the country for over a quarter of a century (although it guards its fair share of not-so-savory secrets). These days, the company’s 15,000 recipes are accessible online via a paid subscription, which costs about $50 a year at the time of writing. Paying for online recipes can be hard to swallow in an era when you can access hundreds of free recipes for almost any dish with a quick internet search. However, that price feels more reasonable when you learn how much dough America’s Test Kitchen spends while creating recipes.

According to the company, it costs about $11,000 to develop a single recipe. That’s enough to pay for a year’s worth of groceries for the average American household, even with inflation increasing grocery expenses. It can be hard to fathom how it could cost $11,000 to create a recipe for baked ziti or peanut butter cookies, but it makes more sense when you consider that America’s Test Kitchen tests recipes up to 50 to 100 times, meaning the ingredients alone cost a chunk of change. After adding in labor and research costs, that $11,000 looks more reasonable.

Why recipe development is so expensive

Chef thinking about recipes

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While it’s safe to say most recipe bloggers and TikTok chefs aren’t spending thousands of bucks creating every dish, developing recipes is more expensive than most people realize. Creating and writing down your own recipes is simple enough, but developing instructions that can be prepared in different kitchens by different cooks with consistently tasty results isn’t cheap. Ingredients and photos alone can easily cost hundreds of dollars, and that’s before accounting for the time and labor required to produce a high-quality recipe.

America’s Test Kitchen is also famous for its obsessive approach to cooking, and it brings the same rigor to recipe development. According to the company, developing a recipe takes at least six months and up to two years, and involves various phases of research, testing, feedback, and refinement.

This begs the question: If developing a recipe is so expensive, how are there so many free versions on the internet? The short answer is that a lot of these recipes are, quite frankly, bad. They haven’t been cross-tested, the writing is unclear, and the measurements are crude at best. While some complain that America’s Test Kitchen’s recipes are a bit too obsessive, calling for incredibly specific quantities of expensive, hard-to-find ingredients and leaving little room for riffing, it can be a good option if you’re looking for an exact approach to cooking — and the confidence that these recipes have been tested over and over (and over). Whether you’re an America’s Test Kitchen fan or not, check out these tips for sniffing out bad recipes to avoid investing precious time and money in doomed dishes.