The numbers on every recipe are calculated, not guessed

Plenty of budget-recipe sites will tell you something is "cheap" or "healthy" without showing their working. Every cost-per-serving and macro figure on Fiver Feasts comes from an actual calculation, ingredient by ingredient — not a rough estimate, and not a guess dressed up as a fact.

Nutrition: real USDA data, not a rough estimate

Every ingredient in our recipes is matched against a canonical ingredient database, cross-referenced with real per-100g nutrition data from USDA FoodData Central — calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, and fibre. When a recipe calls for "2 x 400g tins chickpeas, drained," that free-text line gets parsed and matched to the correct ingredient and weight before the maths runs, not eyeballed.

USDA data isn't always straightforward to use correctly. Its own search results can rank the wrong food first — a search for "chicken breast" has ranked pheasant above chicken; "coconut milk" has matched sweetened coconut cream instead. Where that happens, we pin the exact verified food entry rather than trusting the top search result. USDA also lists "Energy" twice per food — once in kilojoules, once in kilocalories, under the identical label — so calorie figures are matched by nutrient ID, not by name, to avoid quietly pulling the wrong unit.

Cost: hand-researched UK supermarket pricing

There is no live UK grocery pricing API — the major supermarkets don't publish one, and paid scraping services weren't worth it for a get-the-numbers-right project like this one. So every ingredient price is a hand-researched estimate pegged to typical own-brand UK supermarket pricing, the same way you'd cost a shopping list by hand. Prices drift with inflation, so these are spot-checked and updated periodically rather than fetched fresh on every visit — we'd rather be honest about that than pretend to a precision we don't have.

Cost per serving reflects what the recipe actually uses, not a per-portion slice of the cheapest pack size available. If a recipe uses four individual fish fillets, it's costed on four fillets — even on the days that makes one recipe look pricier than its neighbours. That's the real cost of cooking it, not a flattering average.

Why this matters more here than on most recipe sites

Every recipe is written by Harman Bajwa, a UK-registered nutritionist (AfN) — so the macro figures on this site aren't just a nice-to-have next to a recipe, they're numbers she'd stand behind professionally. Most budget-recipe content either skips nutrition information entirely, or estimates it loosely from a similar dish. We'd rather show the actual working.