How to keep track of food in the fridge

Track it from the receipt, not from the fridge. The record of what went in already exists — it is the docket from the shop — and one photograph of it on shopping day gives every item a name and a purchase date, which is all a shelf-life clock needs. Pantry is an iOS app for Australian households built to do exactly that: read the receipt, date every item on it, and tell you what needs eating first. Everything else people try, from the whiteboard on the door to the spreadsheet, fails for the same reason, and it is worth being plain about what that reason is.

Why looking in the fridge does not work

A fridge shows you what is there. It does not show you how old any of it is. Two bottles of milk on the same shelf look identical when one is a day old and one is six, and a container of leftovers gives no sign of whether it went in on Sunday or Wednesday. Whoever did the shopping knows; nobody else in the house does. Australian households bin more than twice what they think they do, per the Fight Food Waste CRC — about $2,500 of food a year — and a fridge that cannot tell you the age of anything in it is where most of that guessing happens. The waste is not the dramatic clear-out. It is the quiet run of days nobody was counting.

The three methods that die, and where

The whiteboard on the door. It works for one shop. It dies the first time the shopping comes in on a Thursday night and nobody stops to write it up, and after that it is a list of last fortnight’s fridge.
A marker on the container. Good for leftovers — a date on the lid is worth having. Useless for a whole shop, because nobody labels a bag of spinach and a packet of chicken thighs on the way in.
The spreadsheet. The most thorough and the shortest-lived. Every item typed in by hand, by whoever did the shopping, for as long as they can be bothered. Why the sheet dies, and what replaces it, has its own post.

All three ask the household to do the recording. The receipt has already done it.

Start from the docket

A receipt carries the two facts a fridge cannot show you: what you bought and when, for the whole basket, including the loose carrots and the deli ham that never had a barcode. Photograph it when the shopping comes in and Pantry reads it — Coles, Woolworths, Aldi or the corner grocer — into a dated list, with a different countdown on each item because they do not age alike. You confirm the list, fixing a wrong line takes two taps, and the receipt goes back to being rubbish.

What a tracked fridge looks like

Once the list exists, keeping track stops being a job. Three things happen on their own:

Every item carries its days remaining. Three for raw chicken and five to seven for milk, per CSIRO; three for cooked leftovers, per the NSW Food Authority. The number is on the list, not in someone’s memory of Tuesday.
The morning digest. At 7:30am, what is turning this week and what it is worth, on every phone in the household. Every plan gets it.
The evening nudge. At 5:30pm, Pro names a meal for the thing that is about to go — “Your lean beef mince goes off tomorrow. Spaghetti bolognese tonight and it never sees the bin.” — while the shops are still open and dinner is not yet decided.

One list, every phone

The whiteboard fails in a shared house for a reason no app fixes by living on one phone: the person who scanned the receipt is not always the person standing at the fridge at 5:30pm. Pantry’s household puts the same list on up to six phones under one subscription, so the flatmate who did not do the shopping still sees that the chicken has a day left.

Keep track from the next shop

Nothing on this page needs doing retrospectively. Keeping track of the fridge starts with the next receipt, not with an audit of the one you have. Pantry is on the waitlist now, ahead of launch, and the first thing it will ask for is a photo of a docket. Join the waitlist and the next shop is the first one that gets counted.