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Kitchen scales
The single most useful object for anyone logging food, and the one most often bought wrong.
A kitchen scale is the difference between a food diary that means something and one that is a list of guesses. Portion estimation by eye is unreliable in a specific and consistent direction: people underestimate energy-dense foods — oil, nuts, cheese, cereal, peanut butter — and overestimate bulky ones such as salad and vegetables. The result is a diary that looks careful and is systematically wrong, which is worse than one that is obviously rough, because you trust it.
The good news is that this is a solved problem and the solution is cheap. Almost any flat digital scale sold today will weigh accurately enough for food logging. What separates a scale you keep from one that ends up in a drawer is not accuracy at all — it is resolution at low weights, a tare button that works the way you work, and a body you can wipe clean in three seconds.
What matters when you choose
- 1 g resolution, and check where it starts. A scale that reads in 1 g steps is essential, because the things worth weighing precisely are small: 12 g of olive oil, 30 g of oats, 8 g of butter. Some scales advertise 1 g but only above a minimum load of 5 g or so, which means the first teaspoon of oil registers as nothing. If you cook with fats and nut butters, that gap matters more than any other specification on the box.
- A tare button you can hit with a wet knuckle. Tare (zeroing with the bowl on) is the function you use twenty times a session: bowl on, tare, ingredient in, tare, next ingredient in. It turns weighing every component of a meal into one bowl and no washing up. A stiff, small or badly placed tare button is the reason scales get abandoned. Press it in the shop if you can.
- Capacity of about 5 kg. Five kilograms covers a stockpot, a tray of chicken or a mixing bowl of dough. Anything less will refuse mid-recipe; anything more usually trades away resolution at the low end, which is where the accuracy actually matters.
- A flat, sealed surface with no seams or crevices. You will spill on it. A flat glass or stainless top wipes clean; a scale with a raised bowl, a moulded rim or a fabric-edged display collects flour and dried yoghurt in places you cannot reach. Sealed buttons beat a membrane you have to pick at.
- A generous auto-off delay. Many scales switch off after 30 to 60 seconds. If you are chopping between additions, a short timeout means the tare is lost and the whole bowl has to come off. Look for a model that stays awake for two minutes or more, or one whose timeout is configurable.
- Unit switching that includes grams and millilitres. Grams are what a food database uses. Millilitres are convenient for liquids, though be aware the scale is simply assuming 1 ml equals 1 g, which is close enough for water and stock and wrong for oil and honey. Weigh those in grams.
What to skip
- Bluetooth and app-connected scales. They add a pairing step, a battery to charge and an account to create, all to save typing a number you were about to type anyway. When the vendor stops supporting the app, the scale becomes worse than the basic one you did not buy.
- Built-in nutrition databases. They hold a fraction of the foods you eat, in the wrong country, and cannot be corrected. Weigh the food, log it where your diary already is.
- Scales with a fixed bowl. You cannot fit a pan on them, they take twice the cupboard space, and you have to wash the bowl before every use.
- Very high capacity models (15 kg and up) unless you actually brew, bake in bulk or portion for a large household. They almost always read in 2 g or 5 g steps.
- Anything with a decorative bamboo or fabric surround. It absorbs everything you spill and cannot be sanitised after raw meat.
Price bands, without the prices
What you get as you spend more, described by what changes rather than by a number. For most of these the budget band is genuinely enough; where it is not, the page says so above.
| Band | What the extra money buys you |
|---|---|
| Budget | A flat stainless or glass platform, 1 g resolution, roughly 5 kg capacity, tare, powered by two coin cells or AAAs. This is genuinely all most people need, and a scale in this band that you use daily beats a better one you keep in a cupboard. |
| Mid | The same core specification with better build: a stiffer platform that does not flex when you press tare, a longer auto-off, backlit display, clearer low-battery behaviour, and buttons that survive a few years of sticky fingers. The step up you actually notice is the durability, not the numbers. |
| Premium | Sub-gram resolution (0.1 g), a much longer measuring plateau, sealed and washable construction, and sometimes a rechargeable cell. Worth it if you are weighing coffee, spices, yeast, or anything where a couple of grams changes the result — and largely wasted on ordinary food logging. |
How it connects to tracking
Weighing changes what your diary can tell you. Logged weights let a food database compute real energy and protein rather than working from "one medium bowl", and the difference over a week is routinely several hundred calories a day for anyone who cooks with oil. If you weigh nothing else, weigh fats, nuts, cheese, cereal and anything you pour.
A practical routine: put the empty plate or bowl on the scale, press tare, add the first ingredient, log it, press tare again, add the next. You end up with one plate to wash and a complete meal in the diary. For meals you eat often, weigh them properly two or three times and then reuse that entry — the point of the scale is to calibrate your estimates, not to make you weigh forever.
Specifications describe what these product categories typically offer. No product was tested and no brand is recommended.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to weigh everything forever?
No, and most people who try that stop logging entirely within a month. Weigh carefully for two or three weeks to calibrate your eye, then weigh the things that are easy to get wrong — oil, nuts, cheese, cereal, pasta before cooking — and estimate the rest.
Raw or cooked?
Whichever your database entry says, and then be consistent. Rice and pasta roughly triple in weight when cooked and meat loses about a quarter, so mixing the two up is a much bigger error than any scale inaccuracy.
Is my scale accurate?
Check it with something of known mass: a 1 litre jug of water should read close to 1000 g, and a new pack of butter or sugar should read close to its stated weight. If it is out by a few grams at that scale it is fine for food; if it drifts while the weight sits there, replace the batteries before replacing the scale.
On TempoLife
Portion sizes without a scale · Analyse a whole recipe · Read a nutrition label · Build a shopping list
Source: Category guidance only; no product tested, no brand recommended, no price stated · checked 2026-09-02
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