Ask HN: What's a good app for grocery management? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good app for grocery management?

12 pointsOdenwaelder14 comments

What's a good app for managing the inventory of my pantry? It should sync between my phone and my girlfriend's phone and show me how much I should buy when I'm in the supermarket.

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Anylist was made for this. It's a YC funded company, but it's great because the sync is perfected, it has a calendar meal plan, recipe lists, those recipe lists can be populated from most recipe websites, works great on mobile and desktop, etc.

The biggest reason I used this over Wunderlist (which also has perfect sync) is there is no way to make two separate lists in Wunderlist and then combine them. This is important because like me you might try to make a separate list for a separate recipe, but it's a no go unless you are making and modifying one grocery list anew for each trip.

Inventory app, make list of everything you would ever buy, what you have in the house, and a meal plan calendar. Then as you make dinners it will automatically deduct from inventory and possibly know what you need to buy for following week/month. If you wanted to get really crazy you could then use your old data to see that maybe you used 15 bars of soap per year and make annual purchases to fight inflation, the time spent in the grocery store, and leverage coupons.

and it would be even better if you could scan UPC and know how much of what you bought with expiration date included. Expiration date could maximize meal planning to minimize wasted food.

Link?

doesn't exist as far as I know

I'm actually working on one.

https://pantryplan.io

It uses up ingredients on hand before it starts adding new ingredients (or that is roughly what it attempts to do)

The plan is for it to plan meals, manage pantry and put out a grocery order.

It is alpha-ish but I am constantly working on it.

I like the meal options, is there a way to show your own recipes or use only your own recipes?

I am actually working on being able to create recipes. The one thing left to do is clean up data. I currently have ~9k ingredients and I am working on a system so it is 1:1 (eg: Not have more than 1 instance of the same ingredient worded slightly differently).

I will make an email blast to users when it is released.

Thanks for trying it out! :)

This is really nice, but also really buggy...

Ah, sorry! Yeah, there are definitely a few unfortunately.

Thanks for trying it out though! :) Do you remember what the bugs are so I can fix them?

A big one is that I seem to be unable to add my own groceries. I type the name, a list appears, but it won't be saved. Sometimes, a page loads indefinitely.

signed up, checking it out

Wunderlist is a great distributed todo list app that's not too overcomplicated and syncs well between devices.

I don't think it'd be a good inventory management system, although you could use it by adding "items to buy" to a grocery list each time an item is depleted.

I've heard good things about Evernote and Google Keep.

I have tried out specific apps like Out of Milk but they were always super bloated.

Keep it super simple. :)

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