New Feature: Turn Any Recipe into Instagram Posts, Carousels and Pins

Your recipes are the best thing you could post. A stack of pancakes drowned in your maple syrup stops a scroll that another product shot never will. But making recipe Instagram posts by hand means opening Canva, finding a template, pasting in the ingredients, resizing it for Stories, again for Pinterest, and then remembering to link back to the recipe. So most weeks it doesn't happen.

Recipe Kit makes the image for you. Open a recipe, select Share image, and Recipe Kit lays out the photo, title, times and ingredients at the exact size each platform wants. Pick a design, download it, post it. The whole thing takes less time than finding the Canva template.

Recipe Instagram posts in every size

There are five sizes, each the native upload size for where it's going, so nothing gets cropped or squashed: Square and Portrait for the Instagram feed, Story for Instagram and TikTok, Pin for Pinterest, and Landscape for X and link previews.

I'd start with Portrait. It takes up the most room in the feed, and more room means more of your dish on someone's screen. The Story size keeps your text clear of the profile bar and reply field Instagram draws over the top and bottom, a detail that's easy to miss when you make one by hand.

Five designs cover different jobs. Hero puts the whole photo up front with the title over it. Ingredients adds the ingredient list, which is what people save on Pinterest and come back to. Colour block sets the recipe on a solid block of your brand color, so your feed looks like yours. While the window is open, download a Portrait for the feed, a Story for the same day and a Pin for Pinterest. Only the size and design change between them.

A whole recipe in one carousel

Carousels get swiped through, and every swipe is time spent with your brand. Choose Carousel and Recipe Kit builds one from the recipe: your design as the cover, then the ingredients, the directions over as many slides as they need, and a last slide pointing people to the full recipe on your store.

It downloads as one .zip with the slides numbered in posting order. Unzip it on your phone and add them to a single post.

A caption that sends people to your store

A post that people love but can't act on doesn't sell anything. Under the designs there's a ready-made caption: the recipe title, a short description, a link to the recipe on your store and a few hashtags from the recipe's category and cuisine. Edit it or keep it, then copy it into the post.

The link is tagged, so visits from your posts show up as their own source in Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics. You can see whether Instagram is sending people to your recipes, and from there to your products.

Your colors, your handle, your words

The first time you open it, the accent color starts from your theme's brand color. Your Instagram or TikTok handle prints small on every image. The words on the slides, like "Ingredients" and "Get the full recipe", come from your Recipe Kit language settings, so a store that sells in French gets French slides. And once you download, Recipe Kit remembers your size, design, color and handle for next time, so the second recipe takes two clicks.

Pins your shoppers make for you

The same designs work when your customers share. When a shopper selects the Pinterest button on one of your recipe cards, Pinterest gets a designed 2:3 pin of the recipe instead of whatever image it pulls from the page. The pin uses the design and color you last downloaded with, so every pin a shopper saves looks like the ones you post yourself.

Ideas to try

• A recipe a week. Pick one recipe every Monday and post it as a Portrait in the feed and a Story the same day.
• Launch day. When a new product goes live, post a carousel of the recipe it was made for, with the caption link pointing at the recipe.
• Pinterest boards. Download the Ingredients design as a Pin for every recipe you publish. Ingredient pins are the ones people save to cook from later.
• Seasonal roundups. In the run-up to a holiday, post three or four seasonal recipes as carousels and link them all from your bio.

Getting it

Share images are part of the Growth plan. Open any recipe in Recipe Kit and select Share image at the top of the page. On other plans you can open the window and try every design, with a watermark on the preview. The share images help article covers every size, design and setting.

Your recipes already do the selling on your Shopify store. Now they can do it on Instagram too. Get Recipe Kit on the Shopify App Store and make your first post.

Patrick & the Recipe Kit team