Hacker News Reader

Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of a pantry and fridge management system that supports recipes and new ordering? Seems complicated until it’s done.

View on HN

AnyList for iOS supports recipes and adding ingredients from recipes to your shopping list. No ordering or anything, but it might do part of what you're looking for.

The vexing thing is that it doesn't deduplicated ingredients from multiple recipes onto your grocery list. You'll end up with onions on the list 3 times if you have 3 recipes that take onions :-/

If anybody has a better alternative, I'm all ears.

AnyList does combine ingredients from multiple recipes, but the ingredient names and units have to match. For example, if one recipe calls for "2 onions" and another recipe calls for "3 onions", you'll see a single item in your shopping list for "5 onions". But if one recipe calls for "2 large onions" and another recipe calls for "1/2 cup yellow onion, chopped", then they won't be combined.

I'm not sure exactly what the grandparent comment means by "new ordering", but AnyList supports ordering for pickup or delivery from Walmart, Instacart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, and other stores: https://help.anylist.com/articles/feature-overview-online-sh...

(Disclosure: I am the co-founder of AnyList.)

This is something I'm interested in doing. Computer vision analysis of at-home food stock -> personalized shopping and recipes -> partner with grocery chains to reduce shopping times and optimize inventories. There are many other stakeholder alignments as well

Why not upc codes into recipes and portions into reordering? Yes, end user has to scan stuff, but if reordering handled well, the initial set up isn’t hard. And solves one of the biggest family pain points: what do we have to eat?

Hmm. If I'm imagining this correctly, then could the user obtain this data via checkout - through some shared database with the supermarket?

And I agree about the pain point. It is part of what got me interested in this a while back.

I also think the decision of what to eat is also an issue with many people. Present them with a few options based on budget, preferences, and nutritional goals. Base those options on inventory data and expiration dates to reduce food waste (grocery bottom line).

Perhaps target the consumer group of:

1. at-home eater

2. enjoys cooking

3. wants to simplify the process.

Then increase demand by converting other eater-types into the target market.

Ultimately, I think user-experience would be the differentiating factor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com