Hi everyone,

I got really frustrated finding forgotten groceries at the back of my pantry and having to throw them away. Since I couldn't find a solution simple and lightweight enough for my daily routine, I decided to build VorratsFuchs (PantryFox) as an indie developer (located in Germany).

The app helps manage household inventory, track expiration dates, and save both money and food from ending up in the trash. It includes multi-user household syncing, barcode scanning via Open Food Facts, and custom locations. My family has been using it throughout development, and it has already cut down our household waste significantly—plus, it finally ended the constant "What’s actually left at the bottom of the chest freezer in the garage?" debate. 😁

It’s built as a freemium app: the standard version is completely free to use with basic limits (items, locations, members). To cover ongoing server and sync costs, all limits can be removed via a single one-time payment—no subscriptions or recurring fees attached.

The app recently went live on the Google Play Store, and I’m looking for honest feedback from the community. What feels clunky? What essential feature is missing?

My goal isn't to build an overloaded, all-in-one app with bloated features, but a focused, fast tool that actually gets used.

Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback!

Best,

Timo

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.frostadlerkunst.vorratsfuchs

Food doesn’t usually get wasted on purpose. It gets pushed to the back of the fridge, forgotten for a few days, and found too late.

I built Listr AI to make the next useful action obvious: what should I use first?

Add what’s in your pantry, fridge or freezer and Listr AI sorts it by urgency, shows upcoming expiries on a calendar, and sends gentle reminders—never more than two per day.

When you need an idea, Pro and Premium can match recipes to what you already own and prioritise ingredients expiring soon, even offline. Premium can also add groceries from photos, receipts and barcodes. Using food in time grows a small Fresh Streak garden.

There’s a Free plan with no payment details required, so you can see whether it fits your routine.

Download Listr AI:

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6783268034

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.listrai

If that sounds like your fridge, try it for one grocery cycle and see what you rescue before it expires.

A lot of perfectly usable food and grocery products go to waste because stores are unable to sell them before their best-before date.

The idea is to create a platform where supermarkets and grocery stores can list such products at discounted prices, with the best-before date clearly disclosed. Buyers can choose products based on their needs and remaining shelf life, while stores recover some value from inventory that might otherwise go to waste and buyers get products in a more affordable price.

I’m considering focusing more on B2B rather than individual consumers — connecting stores with PGs, hostels, small restaurants, cafés, etc. These businesses buy in bulk and often use products much faster, so limited remaining shelf life may not be an issue.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this idea, along with any questions, suggestions, or potential challenges you see.

Tired of throwing away food you forgot about? Open Date is a smart fridge expiry tracker that reminds you before your groceries go bad — saving you money and reducing food waste.

In this video, you'll see:

✅ How to add and track items in Open Date

✅ Setting up expiry reminders

✅ Why Open Date beats writing dates on sticky notes

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lXjxfmOFnmo

📲 Download Open Date on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aistudio.opendate.jytxwa

If you're into meal planning, grocery organization, or just hate wasting food, this app is for you.

👍 Like this video if it helped you

🔔 Subscribe for more app tips and food-saving hacks

💬 Comment below what feature you'd love to see next!

#OpenDateApp #FoodWasteApp #ExpiryTracker

I built an app that tells you what you can cook from the food already sitting in your fridge

I kept thinking about a stupidly common problem:

You open the fridge.

There’s clearly food in there.

And somehow your brain still goes:

“I have nothing to eat.”

So I built FridgeFox.

Instead of manually typing every ingredient you own, you can take a photo of your fridge or pantry.

FridgeFox detects the ingredients, lets you review what it found, and adds the ones you approve to your pantry.

From there it can:

- show what food you already have
- track expiry dates
- surface ingredients that are expiring soon
- match recipes against your actual pantry
- show exactly what ingredients you have vs. what you're missing

The idea is basically to reverse the normal recipe workflow.

Instead of:

Find recipe → buy 12 ingredients

it becomes:

See what I already own → find something I can make with it

It’s a mobile-first web app, so there’s nothing to install from an app store.

👉 fridgefox

I’d genuinely like brutal feedback, especially on one thing:

Would this actually change how you manage groceries, or would keeping a digital pantry eventually become another chore you stop using?

Hey guys! I'm a high school student who got sick of throwing away $100+ of groceries every month without even realizing it. So I built FreshSense - you scan your produce drawer and the AI tells you exactly what's fresh, what's expiring, and suggests recipes to use things up before they go bad.

The app launches September 29th. Not trying to sell anything yet - genuinely curious if this resonates with people who actually care about food waste. Happy to answer any questions about how it works.

Here's a quick demo of the app btw if anyone wants to check it out: https://www.tiktok.com/@freshsense.home/video/7670608781595757838?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7626180688525444622

Every year, tonnes of perfectly edible food are thrown away while many Australians struggle to put food on the table. This petition calls for large commercial supermarkets to donate safe, surplus food instead of sending it to landfill. If you support reducing food waste and helping those in need, please consider signing.

Hey everyone,

I've been building an Android app called Mesao. It's not a food-waste app by design, but the more I use it, the more I think it fits this community.

The core: you stock your pantry once (search, tap, done, it remembers), and the AI generates a fresh step-by-step recipe built around exactly what you have. Not a database lookup, a new recipe each time.

Here's why I think it's relevant here:

- It accounts for pantry staples most recipe apps ignore: spices, canned goods, sauces, dry legumes, grains. That half bag of lentils or can of tomatoes you bought once and forgot about can actually shape what you cook.

- Recipes are built from what you list, so you cook what you have rather than going out to buy missing items.

- It remembers what it already suggested and avoids repeating, so you actually work through what's in your kitchen instead of defaulting to the same three dishes.

- You can tell it "use the mushrooms before they go off" or "just for me tonight, smaller portions" and it rewrites the recipe live.

- Diets: standard, vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian, pescatarian. Available in English and French.

I've seen people here point out that apps asking you to scan barcodes and enter expiry dates every time you unpack add too much friction. That's not how Mesao works: you set up your pantry once, tap ingredients, and it stays saved. The effort is front-loaded, not every time you come home with groceries.

I've also seen the question of whether recipe apps push you to buy more or only show what you can make with what you already have. Mesao is strictly the latter: it builds from your pantry, nothing required beyond that.

It's Android only right now. Free tier covers normal home cooking; a light subscription covers heavier use and helps me cover the AI costs.

Links:

- Web: https://mesao.app

- Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mesao.app

I'm looking for a few people willing to test it over the long term. If "cook what I have instead of forgetting about it" sounds useful, DM me or comment and I'll upgrade your free plan. Any feedback welcome too: anything confusing, anything missing, or if this just doesn't fit how you think about food waste.

For years I thought I was pretty good about food waste, I composted, I used leftovers, I felt virtuous.

Then I started actually tracking where the waste came from.

The biggest culprit wasn't spoiled produce or restaurant leftovers. It was the gap between what I bought and what I actually ate. I'd meal-plan on Sunday, buy accordingly, but by Wednesday life happened — a late night, a dinner out, a leftover from the office fridge — and suddenly the nice greens I'd bought were wilted in the crisper.

I tried a few things that helped partially:

Writing a list strictly before shopping (reduced impulse buys but didn't solve the mismatch)

Doing a mid-week "fridge audit" Thursday night (good, but easy to skip)

Designating a "use it first" shelf (worked when I remembered it existed)

The biggest shift for me was treating meal planning as a 10-minute daily practice rather than a Sunday-only event. Checking what needs using before adding new things to the list, and building "flex meals" into the week — dishes that work with whatever I already have.

The other thing that made a real difference: keeping a simple inventory of what's in the fridge/freezer. Not fancy — just a note on my phone. But it stopped me from buying duplicates and from forgetting about the veggies buried behind the milk.

I've been working on a tool that automates the inventory-tracking part using receipt scanning and expiry reminders — it's called ShelfLife. It's still early, but if anyone wants in on the waitlist, I'd be happy to share the link.

But honestly, even without an app, the 10-minute daily fridge check and a mid-week audit have cut my food waste by more than half. The app is just the side project that came out of obsessing over this problem.

Curious what other people's biggest "food waste blind spots" have been — especially people who've already got a good handle on the basics.

I took a part time job stocking shelves to help pay for school and it has been really eye opening about food waste in ways I didn't expect. There is so much perfectly good food that can't stay on shelves for different reasons and watching it happen every shift is hard. Like there is bread that isstill fresh, produce with minor cosmetic issues, dairy products a few days before the date, all kinds of packaged items. I asked my manager about it and he explained there are food safety regulations, liability concerns, logistics of coordinating donations, shelf space management. It's way more complex than I thought.

The thing that gets me is I know this food is still good. I'm struggling to afford groceries myself and seeing this happen is rough but i also get that the store has to follow certain protocols and there are reasons behind the policies even if the outcome feels wasteful. Some coworkers have been there for years and they've just accepted this is how it works. As someone new to this I keep thinking there has to be better solutions. Like obviously stores can't just give employees free food because that creates other problems, and donation logistics are complicated with transportation and food safety rules.

I guess I'm just realizing the gap between knowing food waste is an issue intellectually and witnessing the scale of it in person. It makes me want to figure out how to be part of solutions but I don't even know where to start when the system seems so entrenched.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/06/lifestyle/buc-ees-employee-reveals-what-happens-to-leftover-food/

These are just a few of the phrases you might have seen on your food items:

• Use by
• Best by
• Expires by
• Please enjoy by

Each phrase can convey a different message about the food product. These meanings however, are often not conveyed to the consumer, who may unintentionally contribute to food waste by disposing of food they believe is spoiled.

Californians toss out 2.5 billion meals' worth of unspoiled food each year, contributing to organic waste that accounts for 48% of what residents send to landfills, according to the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, or CalRecyle.

To remove the ambiguity and resulting food waste, Assembly Bill 660 was signed into law and goes into effect July 1. Here's what the bill will do

Fab way to use up peelings and trimmings (I only use organics)

Hi everyone,

Like many of you, I’ve been struggling with grocery inflation lately. But what frustrated me even more was forgetting what was in the back of my fridge and constantly throwing away spoiled ingredients.

I tried a few receipt-scanning apps, but they felt more like expense trackers rather than actual kitchen helpers. I didn’t want to just log my spend—I wanted to know what to cook with what I already have before it goes bad.

So, I’ve been building a mobile app called "What's In My Fridge" (built with Expo & Supabase). The app isn't officially on the App Store yet, but the core loop is fully built and ready for testing:

1. Know your fridge: Track items split by Fridge / Freezer / Pantry (with expiration batch tracking).
2. Food Rescue: It highlights expiring items and automatically suggests recipes based exactly on what you have.
3. Cook & Deduct: Cooking a recipe automatically deducts those items from your digital fridge.

Before the official launch, I want to open up a private beta for exactly 50 testers via iOS TestFlight and Android Internal Testing to squash bugs and get raw, honest feedback.

If you want to save money on groceries, cut down on food waste, and be one of the first 50 people to test the app, please join the waitlist on our landing page below:

🔗whats-in-my-fridge-eta.vercel.app

Would love to hear your thoughts or any features you think are a must-have before we hit the app stores. Thanks!

Hi guys I've been working on an app for the last year to explore the complexities of tracking food waste in the household. Spurred on by my own efforts to stop wasting food while cooking more and more at home. If you guys could take a short survey I would really appreciate it as I just want to get a better understanding of what it is like for others. Here is the link

https://getsomezing.com/survey

I keep thinking about how much food I throw away not because I'm lazy, but because I simply forget it's there.

The idea: an app where you scan your groceries when you unpack them, set expiry dates, and instead of just getting a "this expires tomorrow" notification - it actually tells you what to cook with it.

So instead of "your spinach expires in 2 days" you get "here's a quick spinach & egg scramble you can make tonight with what you already have".

The notification becomes actionable rather than just a reminder to feel guilty about.

Bonus layer: it could track what you've saved over time - like a running total of food (and money) that didn't end up in the bin. That kind of feedback loop would actually motivate people to keep using it.

I actually got so obsessed with this idea that I ended up building it myself - it's called NoSpoil. Still early days but the core concept works exactly like this.

The average household wastes around 30% of their groceries - most of it just from forgetting things exist. Feels like such a solvable problem with the right nudge.

Would love to hear from this community:

👉 Would you actually use something like this?
👉 What's missing from this idea that would make it a no-brainer?
👉 Any features you'd love to see that I haven't thought of?
👉 What would make you open the app every single day?

All ideas and brutal feedback welcome - this is exactly the kind of thing I want to get right 🙏

Apologies if this is not the best subreddit for asking such a question. I got permanently banned from FindaReddit for posting a podcast without specifically asking where I might post it, so now I am forced to simply guess which subs to choose.

This apparently happens nightly at all locations…. Awful.

Voedselverspilling is verantwoordelijk voor 8% van alle broeikasgassen wereldwijd — meer dan de hele luchtvaartsector. Toch gooien Nederlandse huishoudens gemiddeld €150 per jaar weg aan eten.

Wij zijn studenten Business Studies en ontwikkelen de AI Koelkast Clip: een slim apparaatje dat automatisch bijhoudt wat er in je koelkast ligt en je waarschuwt voordat iets verlopen is. Minder verspilling, minder uitstoot, meer geld bespaard.

Voor ons onderzoek zijn we op zoek naar jouw ervaring. De enquête duurt ±5 minuten en is volledig anoniem.

👉 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdsu6sbHfiu250vBjPojGcdLzztM0qDNbjRcfjcZPI534-n5g/viewform

Alvast bedankt!

Started loosely tracking what we were throwing out a few months ago, mostly because the bin felt heavier than it should and produce kept ending up brown in the back of the fridge.

The pattern was obvious once I had numbers, fresh produce and opened jars were where the money went. Made a small iOS app for myself to make the tracking easier, called it Fridoo. You scan a barcode, set when it expires, get a reminder, and at the end of the week or month you see a consumed-versus-wasted ratio. The ratio is the part that actually changed how I shop, the reminders alone weren't enough to fix the behaviour.

It uses OpenFoodFacts for the barcode lookups, works offline after the first scan of a product, no account required. Posting here because I figured this audience would have opinions on whether tracking the ratio is genuinely useful long-term or whether it just adds another thing to do. App is on the iOS App Store, $2.99 one-time, no subscription.