Etekcity Digital Food Scale: An Honest Review

I bought the Etekcity Digital Food Scale because I got tired of guessing. I am 58, I live in Toledo, and after my doctor said my numbers were creeping up, I started paying attention to portions. The thing is, I had been measuring food with cups and spoons for forty years, and I assumed that was good enough. It was not. When I finally weighed a serving of cereal, it was almost double what the box said. That is the honest story of how this scale ended up on my counter, and it is also the honest story of what it did and did not do for me.

Most reviews of the Etekcity Digital Food Scale read like the same press release. They mention the backlit display, the bowl, the five units of measurement, and they stop there. What nobody tells you is what it is like to live with this scale on a Tuesday in February, or what happens when the batteries start to go, or whether the bowl is actually useful or just a thing you will put in a drawer. I have used this scale almost every day for months, so let me give you the version I wish I had read before I bought it.

How I've Used It

I weigh my breakfast almost every morning. Oats, peanut butter, sometimes Greek yogurt. I weigh chicken before I cook it, because I learned that a '4-ounce' piece of chicken from the grocery store is rarely 4 ounces. I weigh nuts, because nuts are the food that taught me why a food scale matters. A 'serving' of walnuts is supposed to be about an ounce, which is roughly 14 halves. I used to pour walnuts into my hand and call it a serving. When I finally weighed what I was actually eating, it was closer to two and a half servings. That is the kind of honest math this scale does for you.

I also use it for baking, which is where the Etekcity really earns its keep. My grandmother's banana bread recipe calls for flour by the cup, and cups of flour are a lie. You can pack 120 grams of flour into a cup or you can get 150 grams depending on how you scoop. Weighing it means the bread comes out the same every time. My husband Rick has noticed, and he is not a man who notices baked goods unless they are different in a bad way.

The scale weighs up to 11 lb / 5 kg, which is plenty for a home kitchen. I have never come close to maxing it out. The stainless steel top wipes clean in one pass, and the plastic bowl flips up and down for storage. I keep the bowl flipped down most of the time, and I only flip it up when I want to weigh something that might roll around, like cherry tomatoes or dog treats for Biscuit.

What Nobody Tells You: The Precision Fine Print

Here is the detail most reviews skip. The Etekcity Digital Food Scale has something Etekcity calls dual increments, and it matters more than any other number on the box. Under 1000 grams, the scale measures in 0.1g steps. From 1000 grams to 5000 grams, it measures in 1g steps. That means the scale is extremely precise for small amounts, like a teaspoon of baking powder or a single slice of deli meat, and merely accurate for larger amounts, like a whole chicken or a big bowl of soup.

For most home cooking, that is exactly the right design. You rarely need 0.1g precision on a 3-pound roast, and you often need it on a 2g packet of yeast. But if you are a serious baker measuring a full kilogram of flour, you should know that the scale is not going to show you grams, decimals and all, at that weight. It will show you whole grams, and that is fine. It is just not what the product photos imply.

The minimum measurement is 1g. That is another detail the marketing does not shout about. If you want to weigh a single gram of something, you can, but anything under that is not going to register. For my purposes, weighing food for a 58-year-old woman trying to be sensible about portions, 1g is more than enough. For a person weighing supplements or spices in tiny amounts, it is a real limitation.

The Bowl: Useful or Just There?

The included plastic bowl is the feature I was most skeptical about, and it turned out to be the feature I use more than I expected. It flips up and down for usage and storage, which sounds like a gimmick until you have a scale that lives on your counter. When the bowl is down, the scale is flat and easy to wipe. When the bowl is up, I can weigh things that would otherwise roll off the stainless steel surface.

I use the bowl for dog food, for cherry tomatoes, for frozen berries, and for the occasional handful of trail mix. I do not use it for flour, because flour gets everywhere and the bowl is easier to wash than the scale itself. I do not use it for raw chicken, because I would rather put chicken on a piece of parchment paper and throw the paper away. The bowl is a nice extra, not a reason to buy the scale. If it broke tomorrow, I would still use the scale every day.

The Buttons, the Display, and the Small Annoyances

Let me be honest about the buttons. The Etekcity scale has a set of touch buttons, and they take a lighter touch than you expect. For the first week, I pressed them like I was pressing elevator buttons, and I kept getting double inputs. You learn the right touch quickly, but it is a real quirk that nobody mentions in the reviews. If you are someone who likes a firm click, this scale will take a week to get used to.

The display, on the other hand, is genuinely excellent. It is a backlit LCD, about 2.4 x 1.1 inches, which is large enough to read without squinting. The backlight is the feature I did not know I needed. At 6:00 a.m., when I am weighing oats before the sun is up, I can read the numbers without turning on the kitchen light and waking the whole house. My husband Rick appreciates that more than he knows.

The scale runs on two 1.5V AAA batteries that come pre-installed. I have had mine for months and I have not changed them yet, but I will tell you what happens when they start to go, because it happened to a friend's identical scale: the display gets dim, and the readings start to drift. It is not dramatic. The scale just becomes less trustworthy. The fix is simple, replace the batteries, but the lesson is to remember the scale has batteries at all. It is easy to treat it like a permanent fixture.

The backlit display is the feature I did not know I needed. At 6:00 a.m., I can read the numbers without turning on the kitchen light and waking the whole house.

Five Units, and Which Ones I Actually Use

The Etekcity Digital Food Scale measures across five units: ounces, pounds, grams, fluid ounces, and milliliters. I will be honest: I use grams 95 percent of the time. Grams are the unit that makes food labels make sense, because every nutrition label in the country lists grams. When a bag of oats says a serving is 40 grams, I put my bowl on the scale, hit the unit button until it says grams, and scoop oats until it reads 40.

I use fluid ounces and milliliters for liquids, and they work fine as long as you remember that they are measuring volume, not weight. A fluid ounce of water weighs about an ounce, but a fluid ounce of honey weighs more. The scale does not know the difference. It is converting a weight measurement to a volume estimate, and that is fine for water and milk and less fine for honey and syrup. I mostly use a liquid measuring cup for those, because the scale cannot tell me something it does not know.

The unit button cycles through the options, and the tare button is the one I use every single time. Tare is the button that zeroes out the bowl, so you can put a bowl on the scale, hit tare, add oats, and read the weight of the oats alone. If you buy this scale and use it without tare, you are doing it wrong. Tare is the whole point of weighing food in a bowl.

How It Changed What I Eat

The honest part of this honest review is that the scale did not change my weight by itself. No scale does. What it changed was my awareness, and that is the thing nobody tells you. When you see that your 'one serving' of granola is actually two servings, you have a choice. You can eat two servings and log two servings, or you can eat one. Either way, you are no longer lying to yourself about what you ate.

I weigh in once a week on Saturday morning, and I keep a simple food log on my phone. The scale feeds that log with real numbers. Instead of writing 'cereal' in my log, I write '40g oats, 15g peanut butter, 120g Greek yogurt.' That level of detail is what made the difference for me. It is not about being perfect. It is about being honest, and the Etekcity scale is very good at being honest.

I will tell you what it did not do. It did not make me weigh every single bite. I do not weigh the banana I eat on a walk with Biscuit, or the handful of almonds at my desk. I weigh the foods that are easy to get wrong: grains, nuts, cheese, peanut butter, meat. Those are the foods where a serving size is a suggestion, and those are the foods where this scale earns its place on the counter.

Who This Is For

This scale is for you if you are trying to be more careful about portions and you are tired of guessing. It is for you if you bake and you want your recipes to come out the same way twice. It is for you if you are logging food on your phone and you want the numbers to be real. It is for you if you are in your late 50s like me, your doctor said your numbers were creeping up, and you decided to do something about it that does not involve a fad or a pill.

It is also for you if you are feeding a dog who needs a consistent amount. Biscuit is a 7-year-old beagle mix, about 30 pounds, and he is on a set amount of food per day. Weighing his food with the bowl on the scale takes ten seconds and means he gets the same amount every single day. Rick thought I was being ridiculous until he saw how easy it was.

Who Should Skip It

Skip this scale if you need to weigh tiny amounts below 1 gram, like supplements or expensive spices. Skip it if you want 0.1g precision on a full 5kg batch, because you will not get it. Skip it if you hate touch buttons and want a firm click, because the Etekcity buttons take a light touch. And skip it if you are looking for a scale that will do the work of losing weight for you, because no scale does that.

I would also say this: if you already own a food scale and it works, you do not need this one. The Etekcity is a good scale, but it is not magic. It is a tool, and tools only help if you use them. Buy it because you will actually weigh your food, not because you want to buy your way into better habits.

The Bottom Line

The Etekcity Digital Food Scale is the best kitchen tool I did not know I needed. It is accurate, it is easy to read, and it has survived months of daily use on my counter without a single complaint. The cons are real but small: the touch buttons take getting used to, the 0.1g precision only applies under 1000g, and the bowl is a nice extra rather than a necessity. None of those are dealbreakers. All of them are things I wish somebody had told me before I bought it.

If you are trying to be honest with yourself about what you eat, this scale will help. It will not do the work for you, but it will tell you the truth, and that is more than most kitchen tools do. I have recommended it to two friends and to my sister, and I would recommend it to you. Check today's price on Amazon, and if you buy it, give yourself a week to learn the touch of the buttons. After that, it becomes part of the kitchen.