17 ms·

Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management

652 points by jka 7y ago

ron22 7y ago
Very cool. What information is automatically imported to your list when scanning a barcode? Is it just the name of the product?
- madacol 7y ago
  Seems only product name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YH6IJFnfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YH6IJFnfc
cheschire 7y ago
I imagine a future evolution of this could be embedding it on a raspi with a USB barcode scanner, and putting a control screen in your pantry.
- knicholes 7y ago
  You can read barcodes with your phone camera. No additional hardware required.
  - patmorgan23 7y ago
    Specialized hardware reads barcodes faster and more accurately which really makes a difference when you using them a lot
    - alharith 7y ago
      In addition, lasers scan extremely well in low light conditions due to the intense light a laser outputs which illuminates the barcode so the sensor can read it, even in the dark. Just imagining the frustration of trying to perfectly angle your camera to scan a can of beans in your dark cupboard makes me want to toss my phone against a wall.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        Phones have flash now. Except budget phones.
jahbrewski 7y ago
I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?
- z3ncyberpunk 7y ago
  Agreed. If there was some kind of tech like Amazon's just walk out idea that could automate keeping track of everything it would be great. But having to do this stuff manually kills it. It's the same problem I have with personal money mangers; I have to manually import my bank transactions and then further manually categorize and label them (I've scripted some but can't do most) for it to properly work and give me good graphs and breakdowns.
  - jdironman 7y ago
    "You've been buying a lot of alcohol and tobacco cyberpunk, I bet insurance companies would find this info useful."
    - mxuribe 7y ago
      99.999% I think this thought as well. But, if I interpreted your quote correctly, it would require one's data to be made available to the powers-that-be, right? But, since this is self-hosted, only you would have control over your data, and not them, right? (Or, perhaps I'm missing something?)
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    We seem to have all of the downsides of total surveillance, none of the upsides...
- Mike1232B 7y ago
  I think this sort of inventory system combined with automatic updates (a la Amazon Go store style OCR embedded in smart fridges, etc) would go a long way. Have always thought this would be useful, but agreed the amount of energy required to manually update everything would be unsustainable.
ipnon 7y ago
If I didn't have to do the input myself I would subscribe to this for life.
danzig13 7y ago
Do not make the same mistake as regular ERP. If APIs are available, try to integrate to sources of data people actually use vs direct user input.
- danzig13 7y ago
  Kroger has an API for some things: https://developer.kroger.com/reference/ https://developer.kroger.com/reference/
FpUser 7y ago
Grocery management solution for my home? Maybe in some poor family with 10 kids and bunch of adults it might make sense (really doubt it) but the last thing I want to do is use computer to figure out if I need to buy something.
imglorp 7y ago
It would be helpful if sell-by or best-by dates were encoded into the next generation of UPC or NFC or whatever.
satyrnein 7y ago
One thought to reduce data entry (for some people): parse freshdirect (etc) emails, with a default expiration date put in. (The pie in the sky version uses machine learning to make better guesses.)
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  Just from trying the demo, there are default "shelf life" numbers for the vegetables. But it expects best-by dates for the other stuff. It looks like defaults could be entered in.
koski_pindora 7y ago
I'm quite surprised that big grocery companies are not doing this kind of services: If you get this working, one could argue that the "commitment" to "automatically" keep ordering from same shop and brand would be quite high - because it would be so easy. This, with home delivery would bring quite many new hours to a normal week/month. (Personally working with "out of home" logistic solutions.) Edit: mistypes.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
six2seven 7y ago
This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amount of noise in the data and inconsistencies between shops were a bit pushing away (unless you want to dedicate time cleaning the data and training own tailored information extraction models). One of the options to solve the data entry could be: - good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc) - when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available... Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.). Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.
- NamTaf 7y ago
  Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I had dreamed of a Libib[1] for my kitchen, but knew I would have to do all the painful data adding and it was too much of a bother. The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose. In the end, I opted for manual databases too, but they're pain to keep up-to-date. I still think there's a lot of value in a database for all-or-nothing style ingredients, but it was enough to deter me. I'm glad someone is less lazy. [1]: https://www.libib.com/ https://www.libib.com/
nubela 7y ago
Cool product but... This is wayyy too much much. To need an ERP for this problem? And to deal with self-hosting, teaching everyone how to use it.
samstave 7y ago
I freaking applied for HN with this idea and was rejected.. years ago. Called “standard pantry”
- endorphone 7y ago
  This doesn't validate the idea, if that's what you're implying. To be necessarily negative, this sort of product has appeared countless times. It fills a need that people just don't have. I have four kids, a wife, a dog, a skinny pig and a bearded dragon. I can internalize shopping lists, as does my wife. It is incredibly rare that we even send reminders to each other of things. The idea of creating and managing an inventory system is just a complete non-starter.
  - thebeardisred 7y ago
    Furthermore, the idea of then tracking each thing I use/consume (just to keep the inventory count right) sounds mind-numbingly tedious.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  What was your revenue model?
  - samstave 7y ago
    The idea was to effectively have a standard pantry subscription service to a very good library of ingredients and provide cooking instructions, recipes based on what you had on hand - as well as providing a dietary input to what you make on a regular basis. Having a standard pantry which is filled with regular ingredients, but minimally packaged, marketed, etc... would result in a lower waste footprint for the environment to boot. Further, I want to have single-use-plastics reduced as much as is possible. So, it was based on a more sustainable packaging model.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  - No business model - Families (arguably the people who would use this) probably won't use this. It's too much time overhead for minimal gains. Don't sweat it.
stblack 7y ago
I'm wondering if something like this exists, at a larger scale. For example, say five or six neighboring households decide to distribute the shopping chore. One person goes to the grocery store, or COSTCO, returning with staples for multiple households.
- zebnyc 7y ago
  Is this a scenario that you encounter often? I have heard of 'buy together' being common / widely used in some Asian countries but not so much in US metropolitan areas. Disclaimer, my info is purely anecdotal.
yingw787 7y ago
This looks cool :) Don't want to be a Debbie Downer in a time of crisis but I feel like you could use Google Sheets + IFTTT in order to accomplish much of the same thing. Would be especially useful if you could auto-tie this into grocery delivery services like Instacart.
- jka 7y ago
  I think it'd be possible to build a client which would GET /objects/shoppinglist from the grocy API[0] to retrieve the shopping list items, which currently have the following schema: { id integer product_id integer note string amount number row_created_timestamp string } Do you know if there are clients for Instacart (and/or other food delivery services) available? [0] - https://demo.grocy.info/api https://demo.grocy.info/api
giaour 7y ago
As other commenters have pointed out, the manual data entry this requires makes it pretty onerous in a home kitchen, but I wonder if there's something similar for commercial kitchens? You could possibly integrate with the POS system to track how much of each ingredient should have been used given the dishes sold in a day. Wouldn't be perfect for stuff like flour where you need to adjust based on humidity, but it could give you a general idea of when supplies should run out.
werber 7y ago
Love the concept but the spacing on Mobile is really off and driving me mad
yalogin 7y ago
It building an app with form entry is that’s needed google and amazon would have done it a decade ago. That’s not the need here.
gumby 7y ago
We've been using the amazon hand scanner for a while (feeding into AnyList) and it works pretty well; apart from the minor element of pulling out your phone instead of pressing one button this looks significantly superior. You might look at that combo (well AnyList) to look for opportunities for additional features. Grocy seems to have a lot of other useful functionality. I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't exposed more of their ERP to the consumer. For example: they know what they have shipped me, so they could manage the expiration dates for me ("subscribe and save" is a much more blunt instrument). They could combine scanning when something needs to be reordered with scanning as you cook to manage recipe, nutrition, and supply levels all at once. If they know you buy diabetic strips they could change recipe recommendations or what macronutrients are reported.
tucosan 7y ago
I have been contemplating to build a solution based on an rpi with infrared hand scanner and a touch display attached to our fridge. Now, I use a combination of Todoist, IFTT and google home. "Hey Google, groceries, add Milk". Done. Perfect while cooking. No phone, scanner or any other input device needed.
- davidwparker 7y ago
  Our family does the same, but with Google Home + Google Keep. Shared Costco List, Amazon List, Home depot list, and Grocery list between me and spouse. "Hey Google, add Milk to the Shopping List" "Hey Google, add Eggs to the Costco List" No need for third party integrations too.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Hi, app author, if you’re reading here. Is this app compatible with Mono on macOS? It seems like it’s Windows/Linux only which rules out using it at home :(
tchaffee 7y ago
This feels like booking a flight to get to my local supermarket within walking distance. I guess it appeals to a certain type but I don't even need a written list to go grocery shopping.
monkeydust 7y ago
What problems are you trying to solve with respect to groceries? I think you need to start with that and there has to be incentives built in as well as full 2 way integration with the major online grocers.
jldugger 7y ago
I appreciate the community effort but this thing is waaay too unfocused. Batteries, chores and a todo list? I've been using an app called Cinnamon to handle grocery shopping. The general idea is similar: define a bunch of things you want to keep in stock in your pantry. Every two weeks before a shopping run I do a sub-five minute scan. The app groups by category, which usually helps keep it fast. Anything I'm low on swipe left and it's on the buy list. In the grocery store, swipe left again as you buy and it's in the cart. Swipe right for 'next time.' (After a certain amount of time, anything in your cart is presumed to have moved back into the pantry, and anything in next time moves to buy list). For multiperson households, you could split the buy list construction from the acquisition. I guess the key realization here is that data entry is simpler if you only check before planned grocery store runs, and if you can predict how much you need on hand to last between shopping runs. For toiletries its a pretty quick 'do I have an unopened one still?' For food I know some people use meal planning but I just keep stuff on hand and wing it -- spices keep for quite a while and meat freezes fine.
- znpy 7y ago
  I guess you're not understanding the scope. It's not like an overkill of shopping list, it's more of a small scale inventory management.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    To what end? If the data you collect cannot change behavior, it has no purpose.
    - shirakawasuna 7y ago
      To manage your home inventory of regular consumables...
      - jldugger 7y ago
        1. 'Manage' is meaningless verb in this context. If you do nothing, you've managed poorly, but still managed. 2. Chores / task management doesn't fit that bill.
skyfaller 7y ago
This is a cool concept, but in addition to all of the concerns other people have voiced, I have a very specific problem: I've been trying to go "zero waste" and reduce packaging as much possible. This means there is no package to scan, I'm just buying in bulk and putting stuff into bags/jars. There's also no clear expiration date, which is actually somewhat troubling these days, but so far I haven't had bulk stuff go bad b/c I wasn't stockpiling/prepping it. We'll see what happens during the pandemic, that's definitely thrown a wrench into my low-packaging shopping.
- njsubedi 7y ago
  Then stop what you're doing for a while. Problem solved.
- pfranz 7y ago
  Another thread showed his project that printed labels with QR codes that might be a good fit if you're willing to compromise sticker labels in your zero waste goals. https://www.thingybase.com/ https://www.thingybase.com/ I use frog tape and a sharpie. After a year+ I'm still on my first roll of frog tape. If you really want to go zero waste you could with a some sort of color coding system like bread clips use.
RayMan1 7y ago
Do you ever feel like you wont have enough toilet paper for your next shit? Introducing Grocy: easily find a missing product in your fridge,bathroom or an underground bunker. Always know what's expiring next.
dhruvkar 7y ago
This is awesome, I've thought about building a home stuff crud app to streamline and minimize the stuff we buy. This gets pretty close to what I have in my head. Is there a way to set up lists for different stores and different households? For example we live in a building with mostly retirees who are not going out. So we're doing their grocery shopping and delivering it. Managing receipts from different stores, keeping lists separate and then doing the math later to see who owes what is a pain. It's not a long term pain, but thought I'd ask. :)
geniium 7y ago
Am wondering if there are people that are going to use that for more than a week-end. I mean, it's great to know what you have, but in real life, this is just not maintainable. Not too mention the amount of features. And the design seems like 10 years old. Sorry, dont' want to be rude. But... I'll pass. I'll come back when every single pasta am eating will be automatically tracked and re-ordered by a camera "à la" Amazon checkout-free store. Or when everyone in the house will have a chip in the throat and know everything we consume in the house.
wharfjumper 7y ago
Wow I'm so happy to have found this. Have you considered clubs, restaurants, cafes etc as a target market? If you wanted to start earning some revenue to host it I think there could be an opportunity more so than home users. We had started down the track of building a basic version of this for our ski club using MS "Power Apps". Our basic process is: 1. Pre-season: estimate requirements based on previous years and do a few large orders with various suppliers for delivery to coincide with the annual food lift (we can't drive all the way to our club). Primarily this is meat and non perishables such as tinned/packaged items, toileteries and cleaning products. 2. Every few days during the season: perform a stock take of what's on-hand in the club. Send to the catering officer. 3. Catering officer orders according to his/her assessment of requirements. Mainly this will be perishables such as fruit/veges, eggs, bread, milk but later in the season may include other items 4. Items are delivered to common stock room and carried up the mountain by club members. Items are checked off the order list provided by the catering officer and added to various storage areas (fridges/freezers, store room, kitchen pantry etc). Based on a quick run through the demo system I think grocy will meet our requirements for managing consumables. Additionally club members staying on a particular night are assigned duties by the lodge leader e.g. breakfast dishes, vegetable prep, cooking dinner. We may be able to use the "Chores" function to help with that. Personally for home use I would not use this because it would not be practical for our family. Regarding an additional feature: I would recommend looking at Cozi which we use for a shared family calendar which is really valuable for us. I imagine it would be fairly trivial to add that feature to Grocy. I'll let you know how we got on with the club. Thanks and hope that helps.
- fyrabanks 7y ago
  I mean no offense, but the consumer version (as OP linked) strikes me as FOSS's answer to the IoT Fridge, a wholly unnecessary device itself. I'm all about freeing mental bandwidth, but if you can't remember whether or you bought a piece of salmon yesterday, or if you can't be fussed to read the expiration date on a milk carton--adding "extreme attention to minor details" and "tedium" to the mix is not going to help. The right idea here is optimizing restaurant workflows to minimize food waste/deal with seasonal availability/delivery schedules/etc./etc. Take that and slap a nice frontend + tier 1 tech support on top of that? Baby, you got a stew going. Personally, as a pedant, I actually find this really useful for my current, home situation. :| thanks
itisit 7y ago
I’m able to get on remarkably well with grocery shopping without the use of any technology. Feel blessed.
- imabluedabbad 7y ago
  Seriously, can all of this stuff please go away already?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- state_less 7y ago
  Me too. I want to express my deep gratitude to those who sustain myself and others. I show up at the grocery store and encounter a cornucopia of nourishing foods - how lucky am I. This is your time to shine farmers, truck drivers, food processors and grocery store workers. Thank you!
grok22 7y ago
Seems like overkill for something that only a couple of decade or so ago, we used to use our own memory (albeit inefficiently, but most of us will be okay with not doing this with too much efficiency).
kmendes 7y ago
If anyone wants a light-weight version of this, I made a Coda.io template last week and have been using it with my family. Easy to extend/modify as your needs change. https://coda.io/@kenny/perishable-food-tracker https://coda.io/@kenny/perishable-food-tracker
a_band 7y ago
Who wants this? People who ask themselves, "Y'know, if I only had an ERP system to manage my refrigerator and batteries"? This seems very poorly conceived.
- detaro 7y ago
  Poorly conceived because ... such people don't exist? The majority of people doesn't need it? ...?
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I think pretty much every developer has tedious tasks in their life that they "just know" they could improve via an app. Meal planning, kid's chores, financial budgets, you name it - many have considered for 2 seconds building their own. Most of us don't have time. Needless to say, I think this is infinitely more valuable than another meme generator.
opsgal 7y ago
Love! I've been struggling with a way for my virtual assistant to know what needs to be ordered, and the manual workarounds I've thought of don't save much time. Thanks for making this!
jchw 7y ago
Wow! I have been struggling to find exactly this for maybe years now. Other software always felt too limiting or specific, this is just about perfect. I want to give this a go and see if I can do better than I do with spreadsheets.
cjohansson 7y ago
It would be great to solve this problem but I’m afraid the overhead work needed to keep this system up to date would be too high or too high for some family members to be worth it, e.g. maybe a member of the family uses up the last butter and you are unaware of this so you miss to buy it resulting in that the recipe for the evening is not possible anymore
dakial1 7y ago
The main challenge (as other pointed out) is in the data entrey (and update). I see the options as: Grocery Input (easiest): - Receipt Scanning and OCR - Easiest as people don't change supermarkets and groceries too often, so identify once the item in the receipt and it will be always recognized. - Bar Code Scanning - Also possible but too much work to scan each item, and some items don't have a code. - Visual Recognition - Video Camera or periodic photos of the grocery storage, hard to do. - RFID tags and portals - I dream that one day barcode will be substituted by RFID tags, then it would be feasible to have a portal wherever you keep your groceries. - API - If any supermarket offers that sort of thing for receipt data Grocery Update/Usage (Hardest): - Recipe usage - By the estimated usage of every recipe you make (like Grocy tries to do), but that doesn't cover everything that is not on recipes (like cleaning products) - Visual Recognition - The same as above, if it can recognize groceries going in, it can recognize groceries going out - RFID tags and Portals - The same dream as above - ML - By the frequency of your product purchase, a machine learning model might be able to predict when you should buy a new item.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  All this solution only solve one half of the problem, which is input. But there's also the other half which is marking them as you use the items. Yet another part which also needs to be considered is the separate input for the expiration tracking. The latter may be solvable if you approximate lengths for each product in a database, and you assume that the product you bought is starts at 0. But yeah, even if you can simplify the first part as your post describes, there's still a lot more work to maintain the data beyond that.
  - dakial1 7y ago
    I did mention the update there. My formatting was not good enough to highlight it. It's the second list.
soheil 7y ago
Amazing tool. It'd be nice if the default configuration included some basic recipes and required items or if there was a way to import recipes. Even nicer would be a parser tool that would accept a URL from any recipe website and import that recipe with its image and all the items and their location in grocery store isle, etc
aindilis 7y ago
I've been writing such a web-based self-hosted grocery and household management system for the last 6 (and depending at how you look at it - 20) years. It's a tough problem but well worth it. I share my system (which is very difficult to actually release) here in the hopes of giving people ideas, or if anyone wants to work with me. Just fixed a bug in the home inventory component, and am dreading working to integrate purchase management with shopping receipts (both online and local) with inventory. Very tough problem indeed: https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner#a-few-screencaps https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner#a-few-screenca...
smabie 7y ago
I think this software would be useful for a live in maid or nanny. I just can't imagine anyone willing to put in the time to make this work, unless they were paid. I have a friend who's parents are billionaires and have a lot of house help and a very big house with people coming and going frequently. This software would provide a lot of value to them, but not that much to most regular people.
wdb 7y ago
These days you can't get much more than a few mandarins, a bottle of orange juice. I haven't had a home-cooked meal since last Saturday only been eating takeaway as the supermarkets are always empty. It's getting ridiculous here in the UK.
- sedgjh23 7y ago
  Same in my city in the US.
antpls 7y ago
I dont see usecase even for a family of five, because this is solved with authority/responsibility and habits, and it works good enough most of the time. However this could be useful for Airbnbs management, open-spaces with kitchen, and also that new trend of young independent people living together but sharing a kitchen. All these cases need more accountability.
pyreal 7y ago
I started writing a similar app in 2005 using Ruby on Rails. I called it Grocs and even registered the domain name grocs.com. I dropped the ball but I'm glad to see that someone else built it! Downloading now.
bnf 7y ago
My wife and I have tried several systems and applications at this point. We go grocery shopping together, just us, no kids. For us, the shopping experience is important. It's got to be fast and synchronize quickly. My favorite app is listhero. https://listhero.de https://listhero.de Fast, simple and secure. Each list can easily be managed for adding new items, checking them off the list or recovering an item from a "recent items" (done/purchased). There's nothing too fancy here. The great feature is how fast the spa is. But the list app is just where we share the info. It's our shared process which works best for us. Everything on the list is grocery shopping related except for three lists: 'meals', 'pantry' and 'freezer'. Could it be fancier? Could managing our meals automatically add items not in Pantry to our list? Maybe but those systems always seem too complicated and we've tried several (most recently 'plan to eat' which we paid an annual subscription). Getting the shopping right is paramount for us. Raw speed of the UI is the best feature of ListHero. The Meals list is the heart of the process. We have 23 meals on there. If it's time to shop we can quickly decide on a few meals, check the pantry and freezer and then just add items we need to baking, grocery, meat, etc..., almost always by clicking an item from the 'Recent Entries' section. If we were feeding larger groups of people with a restaurant or a college meal coop where we shared the cooking and managed volume orders I'd want something fancier that managed meals and ingredients and shopping a bit better. But for my wife and I this relatively simple works great. Most of the recipes are in our heads. The list app helps us to manage a shared mental model. We enjoy our kitchen heartily.
Hackbraten 7y ago
This reminds me of the Honeywell Kitchen Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer
solarized 7y ago
I just remembering jinyang scanning into his smart fridge.
jeegsy 7y ago
Thank you very much for creating this, whoever you are. I know others have raised issues with the data entry aspect but at least there is something to build on. More relevant for me is that I can now have something to study with regard to the database design, backend/frontend stuff. bravo!!
fmajid 7y ago
I've known about this project for a while, but the coronavirus lockdown led me to install it. Unfortunately, the JavaScript-based UPC/EAN barcode scanning is unusable. Too slow, even on a 2018 Mac Pro, sometimes only scans a partial barcode, and asks for permission to access the camera for every scan. I've ordered a USB bar code scanner, I'll see if that makes it more usable. I used to have a really neat device called the Hiku. It was essentially a WiFi-enabled hockey-puck sized scanner, with a microphone for voice recognition for items without bar codes, and a UPC database. Sadly they went out of business a few years ago but their app still works (not sure if new users can sign up for it), and is great for shared shopping, e.g. yesterday I was shopping and I could see my wife add items to the list in real time, as well as cross them out. My main challenge is that I downsized to a much smaller apartment, and a lot of our dry groceries have to go in plastic bins that are shoved in dark corners, so it's hard to know what we have or don't have, leading to duplicated purchases and also wasted food when it expires. One challenge is the absence of a good universal UPC/EAN database. I tried one with one item from the bin (a box of some obscure knock-offs of Meiji Chocorooms), and when the phone scanner finally managed to get the item right, the online DB identified it as a Disney Princess doll, so it seems UPC/EAN is so badly managed they can't even avoid duplicate codes. Finally data entry of expiration dates is going to be too cumbersome. A better approach would be to have some sort of of statistical model that estimates the shelf life from the product descriptions, e.g. 2 years for canned goods. Less precise, but more manageable, it could show alerts like "check how much longer this can of tuna has left", and if still has some ways, you could enter the precise date only then.
- fmajid 7y ago
  I have a workflow for books that is quite efficient, using the Mac app Delicious Library, a Microvision RoV Bluetooth scanner supported by the app (sadly discontined): https://blog.majid.info/organizing-with-delicious-library/ https://blog.majid.info/organizing-with-delicious-library/ Sadly I don't have anything that streamlined for groceries.
neycoda 7y ago
Pronounced like grossy
blakbelt78 7y ago
So we found an approach that works well for me and my wife. We use the builtin Notes app on iOS and have a shared note where I ask siri to add whatever I'm missing to the list, then every time one of us goes grocery shopping we just pull the list.

652 points by jka 7y ago

Very cool. What information is automatically imported to your list when scanning a barcode? Is it just the name of the product?

madacol 7y ago
Seems only product name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YH6IJFnfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5YH6IJFnfc

cheschire 7y ago

I imagine a future evolution of this could be embedding it on a raspi with a USB barcode scanner, and putting a control screen in your pantry.

knicholes 7y ago
You can read barcodes with your phone camera. No additional hardware required.
- patmorgan23 7y ago
  Specialized hardware reads barcodes faster and more accurately which really makes a difference when you using them a lot
  - alharith 7y ago
    In addition, lasers scan extremely well in low light conditions due to the intense light a laser outputs which illuminates the barcode so the sensor can read it, even in the dark. Just imagining the frustration of trying to perfectly angle your camera to scan a can of beans in your dark cupboard makes me want to toss my phone against a wall.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      Phones have flash now. Except budget phones.

jahbrewski 7y ago

I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?

z3ncyberpunk 7y ago
Agreed. If there was some kind of tech like Amazon's just walk out idea that could automate keeping track of everything it would be great. But having to do this stuff manually kills it. It's the same problem I have with personal money mangers; I have to manually import my bank transactions and then further manually categorize and label them (I've scripted some but can't do most) for it to properly work and give me good graphs and breakdowns.
- jdironman 7y ago
  "You've been buying a lot of alcohol and tobacco cyberpunk, I bet insurance companies would find this info useful."
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    99.999% I think this thought as well. But, if I interpreted your quote correctly, it would require one's data to be made available to the powers-that-be, right? But, since this is self-hosted, only you would have control over your data, and not them, right? (Or, perhaps I'm missing something?)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  We seem to have all of the downsides of total surveillance, none of the upsides...
Mike1232B 7y ago
I think this sort of inventory system combined with automatic updates (a la Amazon Go store style OCR embedded in smart fridges, etc) would go a long way. Have always thought this would be useful, but agreed the amount of energy required to manually update everything would be unsustainable.

ipnon 7y ago

If I didn't have to do the input myself I would subscribe to this for life.

danzig13 7y ago

Do not make the same mistake as regular ERP. If APIs are available, try to integrate to sources of data people actually use vs direct user input.

danzig13 7y ago
Kroger has an API for some things: https://developer.kroger.com/reference/ https://developer.kroger.com/reference/

FpUser 7y ago

Grocery management solution for my home? Maybe in some poor family with 10 kids and bunch of adults it might make sense (really doubt it) but the last thing I want to do is use computer to figure out if I need to buy something.

imglorp 7y ago

It would be helpful if sell-by or best-by dates were encoded into the next generation of UPC or NFC or whatever.

satyrnein 7y ago

One thought to reduce data entry (for some people): parse freshdirect (etc) emails, with a default expiration date put in. (The pie in the sky version uses machine learning to make better guesses.)

Mathnerd314 7y ago
Just from trying the demo, there are default "shelf life" numbers for the vegetables. But it expects best-by dates for the other stuff. It looks like defaults could be entered in.

koski_pindora 7y ago

I'm quite surprised that big grocery companies are not doing this kind of services: If you get this working, one could argue that the "commitment" to "automatically" keep ordering from same shop and brand would be quite high - because it would be so easy. This, with home delivery would bring quite many new hours to a normal week/month. (Personally working with "out of home" logistic solutions.) Edit: mistypes.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

six2seven 7y ago

This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amount of noise in the data and inconsistencies between shops were a bit pushing away (unless you want to dedicate time cleaning the data and training own tailored information extraction models). One of the options to solve the data entry could be: - good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc) - when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available... Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.). Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.

NamTaf 7y ago
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I had dreamed of a Libib[1] for my kitchen, but knew I would have to do all the painful data adding and it was too much of a bother. The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose. In the end, I opted for manual databases too, but they're pain to keep up-to-date. I still think there's a lot of value in a database for all-or-nothing style ingredients, but it was enough to deter me. I'm glad someone is less lazy. [1]: https://www.libib.com/ https://www.libib.com/

nubela 7y ago

Cool product but... This is wayyy too much much. To need an ERP for this problem? And to deal with self-hosting, teaching everyone how to use it.

samstave 7y ago

I freaking applied for HN with this idea and was rejected.. years ago. Called “standard pantry”

endorphone 7y ago
This doesn't validate the idea, if that's what you're implying. To be necessarily negative, this sort of product has appeared countless times. It fills a need that people just don't have. I have four kids, a wife, a dog, a skinny pig and a bearded dragon. I can internalize shopping lists, as does my wife. It is incredibly rare that we even send reminders to each other of things. The idea of creating and managing an inventory system is just a complete non-starter.
- thebeardisred 7y ago
  Furthermore, the idea of then tracking each thing I use/consume (just to keep the inventory count right) sounds mind-numbingly tedious.
floatingatoll 7y ago
What was your revenue model?
- samstave 7y ago
  The idea was to effectively have a standard pantry subscription service to a very good library of ingredients and provide cooking instructions, recipes based on what you had on hand - as well as providing a dietary input to what you make on a regular basis. Having a standard pantry which is filled with regular ingredients, but minimally packaged, marketed, etc... would result in a lower waste footprint for the environment to boot. Further, I want to have single-use-plastics reduced as much as is possible. So, it was based on a more sustainable packaging model.
sergiotapia 7y ago
- No business model - Families (arguably the people who would use this) probably won't use this. It's too much time overhead for minimal gains. Don't sweat it.

stblack 7y ago

I'm wondering if something like this exists, at a larger scale. For example, say five or six neighboring households decide to distribute the shopping chore. One person goes to the grocery store, or COSTCO, returning with staples for multiple households.

zebnyc 7y ago
Is this a scenario that you encounter often? I have heard of 'buy together' being common / widely used in some Asian countries but not so much in US metropolitan areas. Disclaimer, my info is purely anecdotal.

yingw787 7y ago

This looks cool :) Don't want to be a Debbie Downer in a time of crisis but I feel like you could use Google Sheets + IFTTT in order to accomplish much of the same thing. Would be especially useful if you could auto-tie this into grocery delivery services like Instacart.

jka 7y ago
I think it'd be possible to build a client which would GET /objects/shoppinglist from the grocy API[0] to retrieve the shopping list items, which currently have the following schema: { id integer product_id integer note string amount number row_created_timestamp string } Do you know if there are clients for Instacart (and/or other food delivery services) available? [0] - https://demo.grocy.info/api https://demo.grocy.info/api

giaour 7y ago

As other commenters have pointed out, the manual data entry this requires makes it pretty onerous in a home kitchen, but I wonder if there's something similar for commercial kitchens? You could possibly integrate with the POS system to track how much of each ingredient should have been used given the dishes sold in a day. Wouldn't be perfect for stuff like flour where you need to adjust based on humidity, but it could give you a general idea of when supplies should run out.

werber 7y ago

Love the concept but the spacing on Mobile is really off and driving me mad

yalogin 7y ago

It building an app with form entry is that’s needed google and amazon would have done it a decade ago. That’s not the need here.

gumby 7y ago

We've been using the amazon hand scanner for a while (feeding into AnyList) and it works pretty well; apart from the minor element of pulling out your phone instead of pressing one button this looks significantly superior. You might look at that combo (well AnyList) to look for opportunities for additional features. Grocy seems to have a lot of other useful functionality. I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't exposed more of their ERP to the consumer. For example: they know what they have shipped me, so they could manage the expiration dates for me ("subscribe and save" is a much more blunt instrument). They could combine scanning when something needs to be reordered with scanning as you cook to manage recipe, nutrition, and supply levels all at once. If they know you buy diabetic strips they could change recipe recommendations or what macronutrients are reported.

tucosan 7y ago

I have been contemplating to build a solution based on an rpi with infrared hand scanner and a touch display attached to our fridge. Now, I use a combination of Todoist, IFTT and google home. "Hey Google, groceries, add Milk". Done. Perfect while cooking. No phone, scanner or any other input device needed.

davidwparker 7y ago
Our family does the same, but with Google Home + Google Keep. Shared Costco List, Amazon List, Home depot list, and Grocery list between me and spouse. "Hey Google, add Milk to the Shopping List" "Hey Google, add Eggs to the Costco List" No need for third party integrations too.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Hi, app author, if you’re reading here. Is this app compatible with Mono on macOS? It seems like it’s Windows/Linux only which rules out using it at home :(

tchaffee 7y ago

This feels like booking a flight to get to my local supermarket within walking distance. I guess it appeals to a certain type but I don't even need a written list to go grocery shopping.

monkeydust 7y ago

What problems are you trying to solve with respect to groceries? I think you need to start with that and there has to be incentives built in as well as full 2 way integration with the major online grocers.

jldugger 7y ago

I appreciate the community effort but this thing is waaay too unfocused. Batteries, chores and a todo list? I've been using an app called Cinnamon to handle grocery shopping. The general idea is similar: define a bunch of things you want to keep in stock in your pantry. Every two weeks before a shopping run I do a sub-five minute scan. The app groups by category, which usually helps keep it fast. Anything I'm low on swipe left and it's on the buy list. In the grocery store, swipe left again as you buy and it's in the cart. Swipe right for 'next time.' (After a certain amount of time, anything in your cart is presumed to have moved back into the pantry, and anything in next time moves to buy list). For multiperson households, you could split the buy list construction from the acquisition. I guess the key realization here is that data entry is simpler if you only check before planned grocery store runs, and if you can predict how much you need on hand to last between shopping runs. For toiletries its a pretty quick 'do I have an unopened one still?' For food I know some people use meal planning but I just keep stuff on hand and wing it -- spices keep for quite a while and meat freezes fine.

znpy 7y ago
I guess you're not understanding the scope. It's not like an overkill of shopping list, it's more of a small scale inventory management.
- jldugger 7y ago
  To what end? If the data you collect cannot change behavior, it has no purpose.
  - shirakawasuna 7y ago
    To manage your home inventory of regular consumables...
    - jldugger 7y ago
      1. 'Manage' is meaningless verb in this context. If you do nothing, you've managed poorly, but still managed. 2. Chores / task management doesn't fit that bill.

skyfaller 7y ago

This is a cool concept, but in addition to all of the concerns other people have voiced, I have a very specific problem: I've been trying to go "zero waste" and reduce packaging as much possible. This means there is no package to scan, I'm just buying in bulk and putting stuff into bags/jars. There's also no clear expiration date, which is actually somewhat troubling these days, but so far I haven't had bulk stuff go bad b/c I wasn't stockpiling/prepping it. We'll see what happens during the pandemic, that's definitely thrown a wrench into my low-packaging shopping.

njsubedi 7y ago
Then stop what you're doing for a while. Problem solved.
pfranz 7y ago
Another thread showed his project that printed labels with QR codes that might be a good fit if you're willing to compromise sticker labels in your zero waste goals. https://www.thingybase.com/ https://www.thingybase.com/ I use frog tape and a sharpie. After a year+ I'm still on my first roll of frog tape. If you really want to go zero waste you could with a some sort of color coding system like bread clips use.

RayMan1 7y ago

Do you ever feel like you wont have enough toilet paper for your next shit? Introducing Grocy: easily find a missing product in your fridge,bathroom or an underground bunker. Always know what's expiring next.

dhruvkar 7y ago

This is awesome, I've thought about building a home stuff crud app to streamline and minimize the stuff we buy. This gets pretty close to what I have in my head. Is there a way to set up lists for different stores and different households? For example we live in a building with mostly retirees who are not going out. So we're doing their grocery shopping and delivering it. Managing receipts from different stores, keeping lists separate and then doing the math later to see who owes what is a pain. It's not a long term pain, but thought I'd ask. :)

geniium 7y ago

Am wondering if there are people that are going to use that for more than a week-end. I mean, it's great to know what you have, but in real life, this is just not maintainable. Not too mention the amount of features. And the design seems like 10 years old. Sorry, dont' want to be rude. But... I'll pass. I'll come back when every single pasta am eating will be automatically tracked and re-ordered by a camera "à la" Amazon checkout-free store. Or when everyone in the house will have a chip in the throat and know everything we consume in the house.

wharfjumper 7y ago

Wow I'm so happy to have found this. Have you considered clubs, restaurants, cafes etc as a target market? If you wanted to start earning some revenue to host it I think there could be an opportunity more so than home users. We had started down the track of building a basic version of this for our ski club using MS "Power Apps". Our basic process is: 1. Pre-season: estimate requirements based on previous years and do a few large orders with various suppliers for delivery to coincide with the annual food lift (we can't drive all the way to our club). Primarily this is meat and non perishables such as tinned/packaged items, toileteries and cleaning products. 2. Every few days during the season: perform a stock take of what's on-hand in the club. Send to the catering officer. 3. Catering officer orders according to his/her assessment of requirements. Mainly this will be perishables such as fruit/veges, eggs, bread, milk but later in the season may include other items 4. Items are delivered to common stock room and carried up the mountain by club members. Items are checked off the order list provided by the catering officer and added to various storage areas (fridges/freezers, store room, kitchen pantry etc). Based on a quick run through the demo system I think grocy will meet our requirements for managing consumables. Additionally club members staying on a particular night are assigned duties by the lodge leader e.g. breakfast dishes, vegetable prep, cooking dinner. We may be able to use the "Chores" function to help with that. Personally for home use I would not use this because it would not be practical for our family. Regarding an additional feature: I would recommend looking at Cozi which we use for a shared family calendar which is really valuable for us. I imagine it would be fairly trivial to add that feature to Grocy. I'll let you know how we got on with the club. Thanks and hope that helps.

fyrabanks 7y ago
I mean no offense, but the consumer version (as OP linked) strikes me as FOSS's answer to the IoT Fridge, a wholly unnecessary device itself. I'm all about freeing mental bandwidth, but if you can't remember whether or you bought a piece of salmon yesterday, or if you can't be fussed to read the expiration date on a milk carton--adding "extreme attention to minor details" and "tedium" to the mix is not going to help. The right idea here is optimizing restaurant workflows to minimize food waste/deal with seasonal availability/delivery schedules/etc./etc. Take that and slap a nice frontend + tier 1 tech support on top of that? Baby, you got a stew going. Personally, as a pedant, I actually find this really useful for my current, home situation. :| thanks

itisit 7y ago

I’m able to get on remarkably well with grocery shopping without the use of any technology. Feel blessed.

imabluedabbad 7y ago
Seriously, can all of this stuff please go away already?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
state_less 7y ago
Me too. I want to express my deep gratitude to those who sustain myself and others. I show up at the grocery store and encounter a cornucopia of nourishing foods - how lucky am I. This is your time to shine farmers, truck drivers, food processors and grocery store workers. Thank you!

grok22 7y ago

Seems like overkill for something that only a couple of decade or so ago, we used to use our own memory (albeit inefficiently, but most of us will be okay with not doing this with too much efficiency).

kmendes 7y ago

If anyone wants a light-weight version of this, I made a Coda.io template last week and have been using it with my family. Easy to extend/modify as your needs change. https://coda.io/@kenny/perishable-food-tracker https://coda.io/@kenny/perishable-food-tracker

a_band 7y ago

Who wants this? People who ask themselves, "Y'know, if I only had an ERP system to manage my refrigerator and batteries"? This seems very poorly conceived.

detaro 7y ago
Poorly conceived because ... such people don't exist? The majority of people doesn't need it? ...?
bdcravens 7y ago
I think pretty much every developer has tedious tasks in their life that they "just know" they could improve via an app. Meal planning, kid's chores, financial budgets, you name it - many have considered for 2 seconds building their own. Most of us don't have time. Needless to say, I think this is infinitely more valuable than another meme generator.

opsgal 7y ago

Love! I've been struggling with a way for my virtual assistant to know what needs to be ordered, and the manual workarounds I've thought of don't save much time. Thanks for making this!

jchw 7y ago

Wow! I have been struggling to find exactly this for maybe years now. Other software always felt too limiting or specific, this is just about perfect. I want to give this a go and see if I can do better than I do with spreadsheets.

cjohansson 7y ago

It would be great to solve this problem but I’m afraid the overhead work needed to keep this system up to date would be too high or too high for some family members to be worth it, e.g. maybe a member of the family uses up the last butter and you are unaware of this so you miss to buy it resulting in that the recipe for the evening is not possible anymore

dakial1 7y ago

The main challenge (as other pointed out) is in the data entrey (and update). I see the options as: Grocery Input (easiest): - Receipt Scanning and OCR - Easiest as people don't change supermarkets and groceries too often, so identify once the item in the receipt and it will be always recognized. - Bar Code Scanning - Also possible but too much work to scan each item, and some items don't have a code. - Visual Recognition - Video Camera or periodic photos of the grocery storage, hard to do. - RFID tags and portals - I dream that one day barcode will be substituted by RFID tags, then it would be feasible to have a portal wherever you keep your groceries. - API - If any supermarket offers that sort of thing for receipt data Grocery Update/Usage (Hardest): - Recipe usage - By the estimated usage of every recipe you make (like Grocy tries to do), but that doesn't cover everything that is not on recipes (like cleaning products) - Visual Recognition - The same as above, if it can recognize groceries going in, it can recognize groceries going out - RFID tags and Portals - The same dream as above - ML - By the frequency of your product purchase, a machine learning model might be able to predict when you should buy a new item.

ehsankia 7y ago
All this solution only solve one half of the problem, which is input. But there's also the other half which is marking them as you use the items. Yet another part which also needs to be considered is the separate input for the expiration tracking. The latter may be solvable if you approximate lengths for each product in a database, and you assume that the product you bought is starts at 0. But yeah, even if you can simplify the first part as your post describes, there's still a lot more work to maintain the data beyond that.
- dakial1 7y ago
  I did mention the update there. My formatting was not good enough to highlight it. It's the second list.

soheil 7y ago

Amazing tool. It'd be nice if the default configuration included some basic recipes and required items or if there was a way to import recipes. Even nicer would be a parser tool that would accept a URL from any recipe website and import that recipe with its image and all the items and their location in grocery store isle, etc

aindilis 7y ago

I've been writing such a web-based self-hosted grocery and household management system for the last 6 (and depending at how you look at it - 20) years. It's a tough problem but well worth it. I share my system (which is very difficult to actually release) here in the hopes of giving people ideas, or if anyone wants to work with me. Just fixed a bug in the home inventory component, and am dreading working to integrate purchase management with shopping receipts (both online and local) with inventory. Very tough problem indeed: https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner#a-few-screencaps https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner#a-few-screenca...

smabie 7y ago

I think this software would be useful for a live in maid or nanny. I just can't imagine anyone willing to put in the time to make this work, unless they were paid. I have a friend who's parents are billionaires and have a lot of house help and a very big house with people coming and going frequently. This software would provide a lot of value to them, but not that much to most regular people.

wdb 7y ago

These days you can't get much more than a few mandarins, a bottle of orange juice. I haven't had a home-cooked meal since last Saturday only been eating takeaway as the supermarkets are always empty. It's getting ridiculous here in the UK.

sedgjh23 7y ago
Same in my city in the US.

antpls 7y ago

I dont see usecase even for a family of five, because this is solved with authority/responsibility and habits, and it works good enough most of the time. However this could be useful for Airbnbs management, open-spaces with kitchen, and also that new trend of young independent people living together but sharing a kitchen. All these cases need more accountability.

pyreal 7y ago

I started writing a similar app in 2005 using Ruby on Rails. I called it Grocs and even registered the domain name grocs.com. I dropped the ball but I'm glad to see that someone else built it! Downloading now.

bnf 7y ago

My wife and I have tried several systems and applications at this point. We go grocery shopping together, just us, no kids. For us, the shopping experience is important. It's got to be fast and synchronize quickly. My favorite app is listhero. https://listhero.de https://listhero.de Fast, simple and secure. Each list can easily be managed for adding new items, checking them off the list or recovering an item from a "recent items" (done/purchased). There's nothing too fancy here. The great feature is how fast the spa is. But the list app is just where we share the info. It's our shared process which works best for us. Everything on the list is grocery shopping related except for three lists: 'meals', 'pantry' and 'freezer'. Could it be fancier? Could managing our meals automatically add items not in Pantry to our list? Maybe but those systems always seem too complicated and we've tried several (most recently 'plan to eat' which we paid an annual subscription). Getting the shopping right is paramount for us. Raw speed of the UI is the best feature of ListHero. The Meals list is the heart of the process. We have 23 meals on there. If it's time to shop we can quickly decide on a few meals, check the pantry and freezer and then just add items we need to baking, grocery, meat, etc..., almost always by clicking an item from the 'Recent Entries' section. If we were feeding larger groups of people with a restaurant or a college meal coop where we shared the cooking and managed volume orders I'd want something fancier that managed meals and ingredients and shopping a bit better. But for my wife and I this relatively simple works great. Most of the recipes are in our heads. The list app helps us to manage a shared mental model. We enjoy our kitchen heartily.

Hackbraten 7y ago

This reminds me of the Honeywell Kitchen Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316#Kitchen_Computer

solarized 7y ago

I just remembering jinyang scanning into his smart fridge.

jeegsy 7y ago

Thank you very much for creating this, whoever you are. I know others have raised issues with the data entry aspect but at least there is something to build on. More relevant for me is that I can now have something to study with regard to the database design, backend/frontend stuff. bravo!!

fmajid 7y ago

I've known about this project for a while, but the coronavirus lockdown led me to install it. Unfortunately, the JavaScript-based UPC/EAN barcode scanning is unusable. Too slow, even on a 2018 Mac Pro, sometimes only scans a partial barcode, and asks for permission to access the camera for every scan. I've ordered a USB bar code scanner, I'll see if that makes it more usable. I used to have a really neat device called the Hiku. It was essentially a WiFi-enabled hockey-puck sized scanner, with a microphone for voice recognition for items without bar codes, and a UPC database. Sadly they went out of business a few years ago but their app still works (not sure if new users can sign up for it), and is great for shared shopping, e.g. yesterday I was shopping and I could see my wife add items to the list in real time, as well as cross them out. My main challenge is that I downsized to a much smaller apartment, and a lot of our dry groceries have to go in plastic bins that are shoved in dark corners, so it's hard to know what we have or don't have, leading to duplicated purchases and also wasted food when it expires. One challenge is the absence of a good universal UPC/EAN database. I tried one with one item from the bin (a box of some obscure knock-offs of Meiji Chocorooms), and when the phone scanner finally managed to get the item right, the online DB identified it as a Disney Princess doll, so it seems UPC/EAN is so badly managed they can't even avoid duplicate codes. Finally data entry of expiration dates is going to be too cumbersome. A better approach would be to have some sort of of statistical model that estimates the shelf life from the product descriptions, e.g. 2 years for canned goods. Less precise, but more manageable, it could show alerts like "check how much longer this can of tuna has left", and if still has some ways, you could enter the precise date only then.

fmajid 7y ago
I have a workflow for books that is quite efficient, using the Mac app Delicious Library, a Microvision RoV Bluetooth scanner supported by the app (sadly discontined): https://blog.majid.info/organizing-with-delicious-library/ https://blog.majid.info/organizing-with-delicious-library/ Sadly I don't have anything that streamlined for groceries.

neycoda 7y ago

Pronounced like grossy

blakbelt78 7y ago

So we found an approach that works well for me and my wife. We use the builtin Notes app on iOS and have a shared note where I ask siri to add whatever I'm missing to the list, then every time one of us goes grocery shopping we just pull the list.