Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows a normal home to monitor:
1)What food has been bought?
2)What the expiration date is? Warnings when food is going out of date.
3)What meals can be made based on the food “in stock”?
I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home.
I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps would be very useful.
It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping engines such as instacart.
I've thought about something similar but get hung up on data entry. How do you make it not miserable to get food purchase data into the app, given that food doesn't have an RFID tag in it, and not everything (produce) has a barcode? I like the receipt idea - partner with grocery stores to print a qr-code with a machine readable list of items and (maybe) expiration dates. Having to do any kind of manual scan on each item I bring home from the store feels like too much behavior change to become part of my everyday routine. Maybe there's an opportunity to do it for institutional kitchens where inventory is required by default?
It would be fun to build the fitbit and basis integrations. Also, Randall Munroe offered a different approach: http://xkcd.com/1109/ :)
Yes, data entry is the gap. I have been thinking about that and it seems like there are a number of solutions that would allow you to read the text from a photo, vivino.com is an example of an app that does this very well with wine labels. I wonder if you could take a high quality photo of the receipt and the app would add the contents of the receipt to the db based on this? I know its not going to be seamless and may take a bit of manual work at the beginning. Partnering with a grocery store or multiple when the solution picks up traction could also simplify things significantly.
I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home.
I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps would be very useful.
It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping engines such as instacart.
Any feedback on this greatly appreciated.