Instagram is where recipes go viral and then vanish. The algorithm shows you a perfect skillet dinner once and never again, so the only real fix is getting the recipe out of Instagram and into a collection you control. Sharing the post straight to Trivet handles most of them, and there are clean fallbacks for the rest.
The fastest way: share the post
Tap the paper-plane share icon on the post or Reel and choose Trivet, or copy the link, tap + in Trivet, and choose Import from a link. Trivet reads the caption and sorts it into ingredients and steps for you to confirm. If the caption points to a recipe page on the creator’s blog, Trivet follows that link and uses the full recipe from there. If a post has no recipe in it, Trivet says so rather than inventing one. The post is read on your device, and a recipe page linked from a caption goes through Trivet’s import service, which stores nothing.
This works for public posts. A private account, or a Reel Instagram will only show to people who are logged in, cannot be read, and then the cases below are your route.
Case 1: the recipe is on a linked site
Many food creators post the finished dish and put the full recipe on their blog, linked in the caption or their bio. This is the best case, because a proper recipe page carries structured data an importer can read.
- Open the post and find the link (caption, “link in bio,” or a link sticker).
- Open that page, tap the share button, and share it to Trivet. The ingredients and steps come in clean, ready to scale and cook.
You can preview exactly what the importer will extract by pasting the blog link into the free import helper first.
Case 2: the recipe is written in the caption
Just as common: the whole recipe lives in the caption itself. Sharing the post covers it when the post is public. When it is not, the move is copy and paste:
- Tap the three dots on the post and copy the link, or long-press the caption text and copy it.
- In Trivet, choose Paste Text. The parser sorts the pasted caption into ingredients and steps, and you confirm the result before it saves.
It takes about twenty seconds, and unlike a saved post, the recipe is now searchable, scalable, and on your grocery list.
Case 3: the recipe only exists in the video or a photo
For recipes shown on screen (a card in the Reel, a photo of a handwritten recipe), take a screenshot at the clearest frame. Trivet’s photo import reads the text on your device and turns it into a draft recipe you can tidy. If the creator talks the recipe through instead, save the Reel and use video import: it reads what is on screen and listens to the narration. Your first three scans are free and scanning is unlimited with Premium; either way the scan is read on your device and nothing is uploaded to be read.
Why not just tap Instagram’s save button?
Saved posts are bookmarks inside someone else’s app. They are not searchable by ingredient, they cannot scale to six servings, they do not join a grocery list, and they disappear if the creator deletes the post. Two minutes of moving a recipe into your own collection beats scrolling your saved tab at 6 pm forever.
The Sunday habit
People who cook from Instagram successfully tend to do one small batch: each weekend, take the three or four posts saved during the week and actually import them. Ten minutes, and the week’s plan practically writes itself from there.