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

Out of the box, the Etekcity smart scale looks similar to other kitchen scales. It has two buttons that allow you to toggle between various units — ounces, grams, pounds, and two volume measurements (milliliters for water and for milk) — and to turn the scale on or off or to set it for taring, which allows you to subtract the weight of a dish and the other foods on that dish and report only the net weight of the ingredient you’re assessing.

I found, however, that as an appliance, the Etekcity smart scale wasn’t the best. The buttons are built directly into the touchscreen, and they were glitchier to use than the physical buttons on the Escali scale we recommend. Occasionally I needed to push the buttons a couple of times for the Etekcity smart scale to turn on or to tare. But to be fair, this is often an issue with touchscreens in general; I wrote Wirecutter’s original guide to kitchen scales and have found most digital scales glitchy to some extent.

What makes the Etekcity scale smart is that it connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and it sends data straight to an app called VeSync (iOS, Android). This app is designed to be used with smart devices from Etekcity, Levoit, and Cosori, and I was able to access it easily by scanning a QR code that came with the scale. The total setup took less than three minutes.

The VeSync app pulls nutritional data from Nutritionix, which builds on the USDA FoodData Central database, a resource that’s used by researchers, nutrition and health professionals, and policymakers. Over two weeks of using the Etekcity smart scale, I had no problem finding the foods I was weighing in VeSync. You can also use the app to scan barcode labels to pull up nutritional info, a feature that I found particularly convenient and used daily.

The only hiccup I had with VeSync was that I failed to log meals a couple of times because the app requires that you tap Add twice to officially log the food. With other nutrition-tracking apps I’ve used, you tap once, and the food is logged.

When connected to VeSync, the Etekcity smart scale also shows nutrition facts directly on its display, including estimates of total calories, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, sodium, sugars, and protein. It’s nice to see an approximate breakdown of nutritional values directly on the scale, especially if you’re trying to be precise with what you’re measuring.

Because I didn’t need to input the weight of the food into the app, I found that the Etekcity smart scale removed some of the friction I’d previously experienced when tracking my food. When I was weighing a handful of chocolate chips, for example, all I had to do was scan the barcode on the chocolate chip bag and toss the chips on the scale — the nutritional info was right there on the scale’s display, as well as in the app.

When I removed a few of the chocolate chips from the scale, I could immediately see the estimated caloric difference. This made adjusting my portions easier. And because the process was easier, I followed through on tracking my food more than I probably would have otherwise.

By comparison, the Escali kitchen scale is easier to use as an actual scale. Its physical buttons are more responsive and less glitchy, since they click to indicate that you’ve actually switched measurements, and over the course of more than a month of testing, I gravitated to the Escali scale for non-nutrient-tracking tasks, such as weighing grounds to make coffee.

But even though the experience of using these two scales was different, their results were similar.

I measured the same foods on these scales multiple times and got the same weights. I did this with bananas, almonds, chocolate chips, and even two cans of tuna, one of which weighed 2 grams less than the other (which I verified by weighing each of the cans on both scales).