Groceries Go Bad Before Anyone Plans Dinner
Home cooks are overwhelmed by food waste, forgotten groceries, and the daily 'what's for dinner' dilemma. They seek simple, intuitive tools to track inventory, plan meals, and reduce food spoilage, but often find existing solutions lacking or inaccessible. The core pain is a lack of easy, affordable solutions for managing kitchen resources.
SOURCES (60)
“Yall have this maps inside the grocery store its first time for me and it helped a bit! submitted by /u/guafoking [link] [comments]”
“This is actually a perfect niche app lol. The what’s needed view is probably the killer feature, one tap to claim an item would be great in a noisy family chat”
Makes sense, thanks for the reply. Good luck for your app as well!
“Thanks for sharing this. nicely done, and the demo works well. Not quite what I need at the moment though as my slow step is pricing and testing recipes rather than writing them, and I want to keep them my own. But good luck with it!”
“Hello thanks for your feedback! The prices are updated monthly manually. They do not reflect things like promotions/clubcard prices as that would be very messy (for now..!). I would love to include other supermarkets. The obvious next one is Sainsburys. But as I do it manually its a fair bit of work, so I want to see if the app has any traction first. Again, thanks very much for taking a look. PS as a few people have raised the pricing question now I added a section explaining on the how it work”
“I like the “builds your meal plan” approach. Meal planning is one of those problems where the actual pain isn't finding recipes — it's making 7 decisions every week and then figuring out the shopping. The grocery-list side could be a really strong retention loop too. If the plan → shopping list → meals all stay connected, that's much more useful than a standalone recipe app. Good luck with the beta!”
“Pretty cool app I found that I am putting to the test. All about saving food, recipe suggestions etc... It's called Pantry Watch. Kinda impressed. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pantrywatch.app submitted by /u/CockroachDangerous16 [link] [comments]”
“the receipt scan idea is actually pretty smart, never seen that approach before. most apps want you to manually punch in every single cucumber like some kind of inventory clerk i'd open it daily if the recipe suggestions were actually good and not the usual "here's 47 ways to use celery" nonsense. maybe tie it to what's expiring soonest so i can stop playing fridge roulette every evening”
“I loved it. Only thing I would search for is to import meals. It would be perfect if there were a way to parse a text file.”
“I use Recipe Scrapebook it lets me import recipes from a lot of websites. also tracks nutrition and can export my meal plans calendar and shopping lists”
“We were throwing out a lot of food. Not stuff we bought too much of, just stuff that got opened, went to the back of the fridge, and sat there until it was a science project. Half a jar of salsa, some deli meat, whatever got opened for one recipe and never again. I went looking for an app for this and didn't like anything I found so I made my own. A lot of different apps handled one specific problem but they all come down to a list at its core and organizing them. I ended up adding other use”
Thats a cool Idea im working on an app in the diet and fitness and gym space. coming from a passion for cooking I will def make a few recipe and see…
“Ah thanks so much! The first bit of feedback I've receieved - very grateful”
“I dig that you built this for your own family first, that's probably why it feels more thoughtful than the other meal planners out there. the leftover tracking is a smart touch, that's the part of cooking i always mess up. gonna test this out when i get home”
“I'm looking for around 20 people to test something we've been building. The problem we're trying to solve is pretty simple: I want to cook at home, but figuring out what I have, deciding what to make, realizing I'm missing 5 ingredients, and then grocery shopping makes the whole thing feel like a chore. So we built StocknSpoon . The basic loop is: Know what's at home → Find what to cook → Shop what's missing. You can keep track of what's in your kitchen, find meals ba”
“Just installed this the other day. So far I'm liking it more than some of the more complex products (i.e. Grocy). One question - is there a way to add more categories? We have a 2nd freezer in the basement and store stocked up non-perishables on a few shelves in the basement. It'd be nice to be able to create a couple more categories to better organize things.”
“Has anyone here used these apps to make grocery lists with the cheapest pricing and whatnot that is within one’s budget? I’m curious if it helps. submitted by /u/General_Cup2038 [link] [comments]”
“How do you keep track of what’s in the pantry, cellar, and freezers without having to constantly go check? Anyone have a good system? submitted by /u/tdubs702 [link] [comments]”
“A tool that scans your fridge/pantry photo and tells you what you can actually cook with it, plus flags what's about to expire. I throw out food constantly because I forget what's in there.”
“The workflow makes sense, but ingredient state is the hard part. I’d test whether someone can add “half an onion” or “opened 3 days ago” without turning setup into data entry. A first-run demo that turns one expiring item into one realistic recipe would make the value obvious.”
“I saw a bunch of ads for Dashi: Recipe App on social media, which looked like a recipe idea app. I signed up for a week of access in June for a few dollars, which would convert to a subscription if you didn’t cancel beforehand… TL;DR: despite my cancellation two days after my purchase, further emails to the app which have all been unanswered, and deleting my Dashi account in which it advised all of my data will be deleted last month, I’m still getting billed in August. Once I started digging I w”
“I have been thinking lately about doing the same, that UI looks amazing! Congrats! I will try it”
“You can import recipes from anywhere (websites, text, photos and soon social media), add them to your plan, and just throw things into the sidebar whenever you're out of something. When you go shopping, everything is organized into aisles and it's easy to know if you're got everything to cook each meal. My philosophy is to think about meals, not ingredients . I'm calling it Cuicuit 🐥 Open-source & self-hostable because I just love OSS! GitHub: https://github.com/MadeInPierre”
“Just downloaded this. The ingredient input screen is pretty smooth but took me a sec to realise you can swipe to delete stuff, almost rage-quit when I accidentally added 'salt' three times. Recipes seem decent though, first suggestion actually used up some sad looking sweet potato i'd forgotten about so i'm calling that a win.”
“Hello, I really like the card for presenting our meal plan for the day on a kitchen dashboard. Thank you for making it and sharing it! One thing I really need though is the ability to open the recipe in Mealie. I see there is already an existing button which shows the recipe information directly inside of Home Assistant, it would be nice to also have a setting to make this button open the recipe directly in Mealie instead. This way I can quickly go from the dashboard to the recipe in Mealie. Kin”
“congrats on the launch. since you're looking for feedback and visibility, you might want to get this indexed on a few startup directories to help with the SEO side of things. i've been using [LaunchPact Startups Directory]( https://launchpact.io/startups ) for my own projects because it's a one-time fee and gives you a permanent backlink, which is nice for a new domain. worth a look if you're trying to get more eyes on it beyond just reddit.”
“building an entire app out of pure spite for your own memory is peak developer energy. i still fall for the exact same bad pad thai every few months like my brain just hit factory reset.”
“Turns out the hard problem isn’t the pretty UI. Every pantry app on the market makes you maintain a checklist by hand that goes stale in a week, then acts like the recipe matcher works when it doesn’t. Ask any of them “do I have enough eggs to make this cake” and they either say yes when you don’t, or make you count by hand. I got obsessed with fixing that gap. 2000+ commits later, the app is called MealPlanIQ and it does what every other pantry app pretended to do: Pantry that stays accurate on”
“This is actually pretty slick, the smart cart doing math across recipes is something I didnt even think I needed but now seems obvious”
“EDIT: grammar. I mean everything. Not just knowing what's in it, but buying it, cooking it, remembering to eat, planning my meals. The app is called Bread and Butler. You tell it how you like to eat, and it plans everything out, gives you the shopping list, and tells you what your meals will look like and how to make them. It tracks what you spend and what you waste, and it keeps your pantry up to date as you cook. It can: Develop meal plans from foods you like, and avoid foods you don't”
“Live on the App Store, not a closed beta, saying that upfront. Still iterating hard and this is the crowd I want breaking it. You pick a dish instead of a restaurant. Ponch then looks for the nearby spots that specialise in it rather than just serving it, ranking those over chains. What I want tested: does the restaurant matching hold up in your city? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ponch-food-discovery/id6765912802 Free, optional $3.99/mo. submitted by /u/floppydisk-a [link] [co”
“Def done this before haha. Ig maybe making an alert in your phone could help? For me it would always be about a routine. Like on Saturday mornings I used to always make a big batch of beans I would eat throughout the week. Same time every week so it’s harder to forget”
“How are you tracking what's in the kitchen? I see the kitchen snapshot. I've thought about a similar app and I always land on "I need a barcode scanner and some way to make pantry depletion effortless to track" - which always becomes very much *not* effortless. Realistically, people will fill their pantry out once and never maintain it because it's a lot of work. I think the better version of this would be integrating with the Kroger API (if you're in the US) and gettin”
“Using a swipeable feed for weekly meal prep is a smart wedge. To get the best feedback on those 3,500 recipes, it usually helps to find conversations where people are already frustrated by their current meal planning routines.”
How are you planning on improving the accuracy and maintenance planning?
“honestly the "before you eat it" part is what bugs me a little. by the time i'm about to eat something i already bought it and paid for it, so what's the point at that stage? feels like it'd be way more useful catching people in the grocery aisle before the food even makes it into the cart, not once it's already sitting on the plate”
“This feels like one of those ideas where trust probably matters as much as the actual technology. If I used it a few times and the explanations consistently made sense, I could see myself coming back. Have you noticed people scanning foods they're already familiar with, or mostly things they're unsure about?”
“What it is: a cooking app for people who save endless recipe reels and cook none of them. You paste an Instagram link, screenshot, or photo, and it turns it into a clean structured recipe — ingredients, steps, timers — then walks you through cooking it hands-free with a step-by-step Cook Mode. Short 30-second demo - https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dbli0UqMZMb/?igsh=aWtra2ljYnYyZ3hv Who I'm looking for: people who actually cook at home and save recipes now. If that's you, you'll get th”
“I think this idea is great，especially if this app come with image，that would be great and better that chat gpt.”
“Similar to burger maker but with different foods. Time management/ customer orders. Can someone point me in the right direction on how to get started. Thanks. submitted by /u/feverdesu [link] [comments]”
“Every recipe site rates everything 4.7 stars because only people who already wanted to make a dish ever rate it. So instead of stars, this asks one question after you cook — would you make it again? — plus the occasional head-to-head ("which would you rather make again?"). Out of that it builds your household's real ranked rotation and tells you what to cook tonight, with reasons ("everyone liked it, takes 25 min, you haven't made it in six weeks"). Free, no signup, w”
“yeah thats the same conclusion I landed on. search is about 1 device a day and browse is literally 0, so I'm not losing the ranking fight, im not in it. subtitle is "Catch intolerances & additives" which nobody actually types. thats on me. how do you weigh a subtitle that reads well vs one stuffed with search terms? page converts at 42% so im nervous about breaking what works”
“Ask chatgpt or claude to look at your receipt and suggest recipes, then guide you as you cook. If that works well you might not need a new app.”
“The idea is when you shop for food you can get recipies based on the food you have bought by scanning a code on the receipt on your phone or manually entering in some way. So if you have minced beef and a packet of pasta and tomatoes for example it could suggest a recipe based on those ingredients. Several recipes for a large shop. It could be an app or website or even email. It could be something you could check for ideas and guidance but as an optional extra from the shop or supermarket. The c”
“Thanks for sharing! I hope you manage to find some testers. Just out of curiosity, how effective can a post like this actually be for recruiting testers? If you don’t mind sharing, roughly how many people have reached out so far?”
“Stood in front of the fridge doing the usual thing, staring at it for two minutes then ordering food anyway. Took a photo of the fridge shelves and the pantry instead, out of pure laziness, and it actually worked better than planning ahead ever does. Two photos, fridge and pantry, doesn't need to be tidy, just readable. Upload both and: Here are photos of my fridge and pantry. Look at what's actually in there. Build me a realistic 7-day meal plan, breakfast, lunch, dinner, using what I a”