schema.org/Recipe

When a recipe app takes a URL and returns a title, an ingredient list, a cook time and a photo, schema.org/Recipe is usually the source. It is the most widely deployed structured description of food on the web, adopted at scale because the major search engines consume it.

This page is a reference for the type itself: its place in the hierarchy, every property it defines, the inherited ones that appear on recipes, and what the markup looks like in practice. For what Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD are as syntaxes, and how schema.org came to exist at all, start with the introduction. For the older, HTML-class-based approach to the same problem, see hRecipe.

About this reference

Canonical URL	https://schema.org/Recipe
Hierarchy	Thing → CreativeWork → HowTo → Recipe
Published by	schema.org — Bing, Google, Yahoo!, Yandex
Typical syntaxes	JSON-LD (dominant), Microdata, RDFa
Reflects the vocabulary as of	schema.org version 30.0

The property lists below were built from the schema.org vocabulary dump rather than transcribed by hand, so the ranges are the ranges the vocabulary actually declares — which is not always what the tutorials say.

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Where Recipe sits

A recipe, in schema.org's model, is a kind of instruction set that happens to produce food. The full chain is:

Level	Type	What it contributes
1	Thing	name, description, image, url, identifier, sameAs.
2	CreativeWork	Authorship, dates, licensing, ratings, video, keywords.
3	HowTo	Steps, supplies, tools, durations, yield, estimated cost.
4	Recipe	The food-specific narrowing: ingredients, cuisine, nutrition, diet.

That ordering post-dates the types themselves. Recipe is the older type; HowTo arrived later and was slotted in above it. Schema.org's release notes for version 3.3 (14 August 2017) describe adding "a HowTo type, building upon and generalizing the existing Recipe vocabulary" — that release introduced estimatedCost, steps, supply and tool, and generalized recipeYield into yield and cookTime into performTime.

This is why several Recipe properties are formally sub-properties of HowTo ones, and why you will meet near-duplicate pairs:

Recipe property	Sub-property of	Meaning of the pair
cookTime	performTime	Time spent actually doing the thing.
recipeYield	yield	What comes out the other end.
recipeIngredient	supply	Things consumed by the process.
recipeInstructions	step	The ordered procedure.

Both members of each pair are valid. In practice publishers use the recipe* form and consumers should read both.

How it is published

Two syntaxes carry essentially all Recipe markup in the wild. JSON-LD sits in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block in the document, structurally independent of the visible HTML. Microdata annotates the visible HTML itself with itemscope / itemtype / itemprop attributes. RDFa Lite is legal and almost unused for recipes. All three are described in detail on the JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa section of the intro page.

JSON-LD decouples the markup from the template: a CMS plugin can emit the block without a theme author touching a single <div>. The trade-off is that the structured data and the human-visible page are separate documents, and the two can differ.

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Properties defined on Recipe

These nine are declared directly on Recipe. Everything else you see on a recipe in the wild is inherited.

Property	Type	What it holds
recipeIngredient	ItemList, PropertyValue, Text	An ingredient, or an ordered list of them, with quantities. Free text like "2 slices sourdough" is the overwhelming norm.
recipeInstructions	CreativeWork, ItemList, Text	The procedure — a single item, or an ordered list of HowToStep and/or HowToSection items. See the shapes it takes.
recipeYield	QuantitativeValue, Text	What the recipe produces: "4 servings", "one 9-inch loaf", "12".
cookTime	Duration	Time the dish is actually cooking, as an ISO-8601 duration (PT30M).
recipeCategory	Text	The course or role — "appetizer", "entree", "dessert". Uncontrolled vocabulary.
recipeCuisine	Text	The culinary tradition — "French", "Ethiopian". Also uncontrolled.
cookingMethod	Text	How it is cooked — "Frying", "Steaming". Uncontrolled, and rarely emitted.
nutrition	NutritionInformation	A structured nutrition block. See nutrition.
suitableForDiet	RestrictedDiet, Diet	A dietary restriction the dish satisfies. RestrictedDiet is an enumeration; Diet comes from the health-lifesci extension.

Superseded on Recipe

Property	Type	Status
ingredients	Text	Superseded by recipeIngredient. Defined as a single ingredient. Still emitted by aging templates.

Superseded, in schema.org's model, does not mean removed. ingredients still resolves, still validates, and still shows up in real documents served today. A parser that ignores it will silently lose ingredient lists on older sites.

The RestrictedDiet enumeration

suitableForDiet is one of the few places Recipe reaches for a controlled vocabulary rather than free text. The members are:

DiabeticDiet, GlutenFreeDiet, HalalDiet, HinduDiet, KosherDiet, LowCalorieDiet, LowFatDiet, LowLactoseDiet, LowSaltDiet, VeganDiet, VegetarianDiet.

Eleven values, expressed as URLs (https://schema.org/VeganDiet). Several restrictions in common use are absent — dairy-free, nut-free, keto, pescatarian. Schema.org's own note on Recipe directs publishers to keywords for dietary detail the enumeration does not cover.

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Inherited from HowTo

These are declared on HowTo and available on every Recipe. Several of them are the general form of a Recipe-specific property; a few have no Recipe-specific counterpart at all and are the only way to express the concept.

Property	Type	What it holds
prepTime	Duration	Time to prepare the supplies before the cooking starts. ISO-8601.
totalTime	Duration	Total time, preparation included. ISO-8601.
performTime	Duration	The general form of cookTime — time spent performing the instructions.
yield	QuantitativeValue, Text	The general form of recipeYield.
step	CreativeWork, HowToSection, HowToStep, Text	The general form of recipeInstructions.
supply	HowToSupply, Text	Something consumed by the process — the general form of recipeIngredient.
tool	HowToTool, Text	Something used but not consumed: a skillet, a spatula. The nearest thing to equipment.
estimatedCost	MonetaryAmount, Text	Estimated cost of the supplies.

Superseded	Type	Status
steps	CreativeWork, ItemList, Text	Superseded by step. Introduced in v3.3 and renamed almost immediately — the vocabulary itself notes it was "originally misnamed".

There is no recipeEquipment property. Equipment is expressed with the inherited tool, which the vocabulary distinguishes from supply by consumption: supplies are consumed by the process, tools are not.

The step types

Type	What it holds
HowToStep	One step. Simultaneously a CreativeWork, an ItemList and a ListItem — so it can nest.
HowToSection	A named group of steps, e.g. "For the crust" inside a pie recipe.
HowToSupply	A structured supply, with a requiredQuantity.
HowToTool	A structured tool.

Inherited from CreativeWork and Thing

CreativeWork alone contributes well over a hundred properties, most of which have nothing to do with food. These are the ones that actually appear on recipes.

Property	From	Type	What it holds
name	Thing	Text	The dish's name. Effectively mandatory in practice.
description	Thing	Text, TextObject	The headnote — the paragraph before the ingredients.
image	Thing	ImageObject, URL	A photo of the finished dish.
url	Thing	URL	Canonical URL for the recipe.
sameAs	Thing	URL	A URL unambiguously identifying the same thing elsewhere.
author	CreativeWork	Person, Organization	Who wrote it.
publisher	CreativeWork	Person, Organization	Who published it.
datePublished	CreativeWork	Date, DateTime	First publication date.
dateModified	CreativeWork	Date, DateTime	Last revision date.
keywords	CreativeWork	DefinedTerm, Text, URL	Free tags. Carries the load suitableForDiet cannot.
aggregateRating	CreativeWork	AggregateRating	Average star rating plus a count.
review	CreativeWork	Review	Individual reviews.
video	CreativeWork	Clip, VideoObject	An embedded how-to video.
inLanguage	CreativeWork	Language, Text	BCP 47 language tag.
license	CreativeWork	CreativeWork, URL	The licence the recipe is published under. Almost never present.
isBasedOn	CreativeWork	CreativeWork, Product, URL	Adapted-from: the work this recipe is derived from.
mainEntityOfPage	Thing	CreativeWork, URL	Says this recipe is what the page is about.

Nutrition

nutrition takes a NutritionInformation (Thing → Intangible → StructuredValue → NutritionInformation), which declares twelve properties.

Property	Type	What it holds
servingSize	Text	The serving this block describes.
calories	Energy	Calorie count.
fatContent	Mass	Grams of fat.
saturatedFatContent	Mass	Grams of saturated fat.
unsaturatedFatContent	Mass	Grams of unsaturated fat.
transFatContent	Mass	Grams of trans fat.
cholesterolContent	Mass	Milligrams of cholesterol.
carbohydrateContent	Mass	Grams of carbohydrate.
fiberContent	Mass	Grams of fibre.
sugarContent	Mass	Grams of sugar.
proteinContent	Mass	Grams of protein.
sodiumContent	Mass	Milligrams of sodium.

Energy and Mass are both quantity types serialised as text with a unit — "240 calories", "9 g". The unit lives inside the string, which means every consumer writes the same small unit-parsing routine.

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A grilled cheese, marked up

The minimum viable Recipe, as JSON-LD:

<script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Recipe",
    "name": "Grilled Cheese",
    "recipeYield": "1 sandwich",
    "cookTime": "PT6M",
    "recipeIngredient": ["2 slices bread", "2 slices cheddar", "1 tbsp butter"],
    "recipeInstructions": [
      { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Butter one side of each slice of bread." },
      { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Sandwich the cheese between the unbuttered sides." },
      { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Griddle over medium heat until golden on both sides." }
    ]
  }
</script>

The same recipe as Microdata, annotating markup a human actually reads:

<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Recipe">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Grilled Cheese</h1>
  <p>Makes <span itemprop="recipeYield">1 sandwich</span> in <meta itemprop="cookTime" content="PT6M" />6 minutes.</p>
  <ul>
    <li itemprop="recipeIngredient">2 slices bread</li>
    <li itemprop="recipeIngredient">2 slices cheddar</li>
    <li itemprop="recipeIngredient">1 tbsp butter</li>
  </ul>
  <ol itemprop="recipeInstructions">
    <li>Butter one side of each slice of bread.</li>
    <li>Sandwich the cheese between the unbuttered sides.</li>
    <li>Griddle over medium heat until golden on both sides.</li>
  </ol>
</div>

Note the <meta> element in the Microdata version. cookTime takes an ISO-8601 duration and the visible text reads "6 minutes", so the machine value is carried in an empty element next to the human-readable one. JSON-LD does not have this problem because it does not share the DOM with the rendered page.

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What the markup looks like in practice

The vocabulary permits more variation than most publishers exercise, and real documents diverge from the specification in consistent ways. What follows is description of the deployed web, not of the standard.

recipeInstructions arrives in four shapes. Its declared range is Text, ItemList or CreativeWork, and because HowToStep and HowToSection are both subclasses of CreativeWork, a conforming parser has to handle all of: a single string containing the whole method; an array of strings; an array of HowToStep objects; and an array of HowToSection objects each wrapping its own array of steps. All four are valid and all four are common. The single-string case carries no step boundaries, so splitting it is heuristic.

recipeYield is free text in practice. "4 servings", "4-6", "Serves 4", "12 cookies", "1 loaf" and bare "4" all appear. The QuantitativeValue range is available and rarely used, so numeric scaling requires parsing the string.

Durations are frequently malformed. cookTime, prepTime and totalTime take ISO-8601 (PT30M). Production markup also contains "30 min", "PT30", "P30M" (which parses as thirty months), "0:30" and bare "30".

Three descriptive properties are uncontrolled. recipeCategory, recipeCuisine and cookingMethod are plain Text with example values in the documentation and no enumeration, so "dessert", "Dessert", "Desserts" and "Sweets" are four distinct values to an aggregator. suitableForDiet is the one property with a controlled list, and it has eleven members.

Search-engine requirements shape what gets emitted. Google's recipe rich-result documentation lists two required properties — name and image — with everything else recommended. Markup in the wild reflects those incentives: aggregateRating and a hero image are near-universal, and the JSON-LD block and the visible page can carry different values for the same field.

Superseded properties remain in circulation. Supersession in schema.org is advisory, so ingredients and steps are still valid, still resolve, and are still emitted by long-untouched templates. Parsers that drop them lose data on older sites.

Nutrition units are inside the strings. "9 g", "240 calories" — every consumer parses the unit out of the value.

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Further reading

• schema.org/Recipe — the canonical type page, with live examples in all three syntaxes.
• schema.org/HowTo — the parent type, and the source of the step, supply, tool and duration vocabulary.
• schema.org itself, and its release history — every version, with the types and properties each one added, changed or superseded.
• hRecipe — the microformats recipe vocabulary, released in 2008 and built on HTML class names instead of a parallel document.

Two vocabularies, one dish. schema.org puts the description in a parallel data structure; microformats puts it in the HTML a person is already reading. Both are emitted on the web today, and Buttery reads both.