I Tested a Smart Kitchen Scale, Then Resumed Using a Regular One

An Etekcity Smart Food Scale and an Escali Primo Digital Scale in front of a beige background.

If you’ve spent time on social media, you’ve probably come across any number of fit-fluencers or longevity experts urging you to track calories and macros (protein, fat, and carbohydrates) to build muscle, lose fat, improve athletic performance, or simply feel better.

There are benefits to gaining a better understanding of the amount and nutritional composition of the food you’re consuming. For that, a kitchen scale and a food log can help. However, the dieticians and other experts I spoke with emphasized that they would recommend this degree of calorie- and macro-tracking for only a limited amount of time.

“I tell people to use a scale for a calibration week,” said nutritionist Lena Beal, a registered dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “It’s a great way to reset your eye for portion sizes, then put it away and let those lessons guide them naturally,” she suggested. “You might think of it like how you use a GPS. You don’t need it forever, but it helps you stay on course.”

Over the longer term, tracking food intake with the help of a kitchen scale can be most helpful for athletes, people with medical nutrition needs, or anyone managing a weight-loss plateau, Beal added. (She and other experts I consulted don’t recommend food-weighing and food-tracking for everyone.)

The problem is how to estimate macros and total calories with relative precision, in a way that’s easy enough to do for every single meal. This is where I’ve been struggling for the past year.

Specifically, I’ve been trying to eat more protein and fiber, after reading extensively about the benefits of both. And after hitting my own weight-loss plateau, I’ve been tracking my intake, off and on, using a kitchen scale and a nutrition-tracking app.

But it’s a pain — requiring multiple, often tedious steps. I weigh the food on the scale, search for the food in the app, enter the food’s weight to estimate the macros, and then do it all over again for the next thing I’m putting on my plate. To do it for every meal is exhausting.

Smart kitchen scales promise to bypass at least one of those steps, by sending the food weight directly to an app on your phone via Bluetooth. The Etekcity Smart Food Scale is one of the most popular (and affordable) of the dozen or so smart kitchen scales available.

In my years of testing products for Wirecutter, I’ve often found that the simplest options win. And indeed, after comparing the experience of using the Etekcity scale and its accompanying app against using Wirecutter’s top-pick kitchen scale, the Escali Primo Digital Scale, paired with another app, I determined that the latter setup served my needs just fine.



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