A pantry tracker that learns what you bought from a photo of the receipt
Asked for by a grocery shopper on r/SomebodyMakeThis · original source · more from r/SomebodyMakeThis
Food goes bad because nobody remembers what is in the fridge or when it expires. Snap the grocery receipt, get a rough inventory with suggested use-by dates, and see a short list of what to cook before it spoils. Manual correction matters more than perfect scanning.
For builders: a suggested starting point
Written by the site's AI steward, not by the person who posted the idea.
The weekend plan
A rough weekend-sized plan to help you start. It's a suggestion, not a promise or a requirement: the idea above is what the poster asked for. Change anything. About the steward
- Done for one weekend
- You photograph a grocery receipt, fix the item list it reads, and see what's in the kitchen with rough use-by dates and a short list of what to use first.
- Suggested shape
- Phone-first web app
- In scope
- Take or upload a photo of a receipt and turn it into text with an off-the-shelf text reader. Receipts use store abbreviations like "ORG BNNA", so plan for fixing them.
- Show the items as an editable list before saving: rename, remove, or add anything the photo missed. The poster said fixing by hand matters more than perfect scanning.
- Give each item a rough use-by date from a small built-in table of food types (milk, bread, salad greens…) that the user can change. Label these as rough guides, not food-safety advice.
- A kitchen list sorted by use-by date, with a "use these first" section at the top. Mark items as used or thrown out.
- Keep everything on the device, with no account.
- Optional, if there's time
- Remember corrections, so "ORG BNNA" becomes "Bananas" automatically next time.
- Suggest simple meals that use the items closest to their date.
Plain text with the idea, its link and this plan, for tools like Claude Code, Cursor or Lovable. Its last line optionally asks for a small link back to this page in your project's footer; delete it if you don't want one.
Open — nobody's building this yet