This is exactly what I needed and was thinking about building a similar app. But to be really useful and automated, there's a bit long way I'm afraid. The biggest deal breaker is the time spend for the data entry and updates, leaving a pen-and-paper / notes solution still the most easy to use and just visiting local groceries and shops. I was collecting receipts and playing a bit with scanning of these, but the amount of noise in the data and inconsistencies between shops were a bit pushing away (unless you want to dedicate time cleaning the data and training own tailored information extraction models).
One of the options to solve the data entry could be:
- good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc)
- when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier
Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available...
Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.).
Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.
If you shop at walmart, there is an option to add a receipt to your account by scanning the barcode in the app (or it shows up by itself when you use walmart pay). These can be retrieved online from anywhere (not just the app) and is how I do it, way easier than you think. It basically comes down to
$(".icon-button-children").each((index, item) => ($(item).click())) // expand all items
$(".LinesEllipsis ").each((index, item) => console.log(item.innerText)) // record the stuff
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I had dreamed of a Libib[1] for my kitchen, but knew I would have to do all the painful data adding and it was too much of a bother.
The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose.
In the end, I opted for manual databases too, but they're pain to keep up-to-date. I still think there's a lot of value in a database for all-or-nothing style ingredients, but it was enough to deter me. I'm glad someone is less lazy.
Isn't this why "Alexa, add flour and olive oil to my shopping list" supposed make it so useful? You know when you are using something that you are almost out, and easy to say out loud to add to a list. It doesn't need to be so granular so something gets a reorder when there is only 2oz of olive oil left.
> The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose.
Definitely. Or, even, just taking some snacks to another room, and later placing it back to an 'intelligent' cupboard, let's say. In extreme cases, one may need be under a constant tracking at home.
But, simplifying, another option may be to use an improved voice assistant when cooking. One would need then to interact with the VA to note and confirm the stuff used. Improved VA, in essence, would try to 'understand' the activities and interact, instead of being a passive one (as most of currently are), that one needs to say commands. This would require adding it access to camera and maybe other sensors available at 'smart' home. Definitely a lot of interesting and challenging problems to tackle not forgetting too about the user privacy part.
For items like oil and flour or other staples, maybe the best option would be to track and learn how often you are buying those items and have it added to your list when the time is approaching.
I think the key is the meal planning. The recipes need to bulk manage the inventories and list as meals are prepared and upcoming. The recipes would need to be cleaned up and normalized.
I built chowcaster to (a) learn jquery mobile and (b) solve a simpler problem: keeping track of what was in the deep freeze in my dettached garage. We used a barcode scanner for data entry, but even this was too much hassle and was eventually abandoned.
Re data entry: was thinking this through a lot recently.
Basically what I'd like to build requires either (1) product recognition vision like Google Lens offers, or (2) a barcode scanner and an extensive barcode product database. Both can be combined of course.
My solution would be to read frames from a smartphone's camera until a barcode is detected. This can be achieved with eg Firebase ML, on-device. If a barcode database lookup gives a product, put it on the in/out list. If not, send the frame to a product recognition vision service. This could be Google Cloud Vision AI, but they don't give you access to their product set that backs Google Lens.
Finally, provide controls to adjust the number of items on the in/out list
I thought about OCRing supermarket receipts too but these differ so greatly in layout etc. per country I figured it's not the way to go
Edit: Problem you run into as not all of this can be done on-device is privacy concerns of coursem just my thoughts on what interface I'd like to have
I just tested Product Open Data using the barcode from a can of Coconut Milk from my cupboard, and it returned the correct product (including a photograph) and the name of the brand and their owner.
Edit: updated to add Open Food Facts, given that Open Product Data appears no-longer-maintained
Unless you can build a system that can identify the product as fast as you can pull it out or put in in the fridge or pantry, without holding a phone in one hand, it will be unusable.
"I thought about OCRing supermarket receipts too but these differ so greatly in layout etc. per country I figured it's not the way to go"
People usually shop at the same places and the same things, so they could identify the products in the receipts once and then only update the new ones. Also,You could crowdsource it.
Just discovered a potential workaround with one vendor.
It turns out that with an Amazon Prime account and shopping at Whole Foods the entire history is available down the the SKU, quantity, and date. Discovered this when going to order a delivery for the first time in the COVID-19 outbreak - aside from the generic shopping selection, we can also pick from our own previous purchases.
I haven't checked if there are other methods to access the data (e.g., with the app, or some history list), but there's the potential for at least some screen-scraping, and maybe they'll make the history available in a downloadable file if we pester them? It'd certainly help both this app and making their stores a bit 'stickier'.
With the image recognition, I think the dream might be: take a picture of your shopping cart or basket, recognize any product that is at no more than 50% occluded. Put a red square around any item not recognized, let the user pick it up and rotate it until it's recognized.
there is https://github.com/Forceu/barcodebuddy that integrates with grocy:
"If already in Grocys system, it will consume/add/open the product in Grocy. If an unknown barcode is passed, the product name will be looked up and a corresponding product can be chosen in the Web UI. Tags can be saved - if a new product contains the tag in the name, the product will be already preselected in the drop-down list."
Me too, was thinking about creating simple web app. for myself. Purely from the view of food wastage. I live alone and it's pretty difficult sometimes being able to plan meals when some food packs don't last. Freezable things are OK, but sometimes the salad goes in the bin. Tracking these things avoids purchasing any unnecessary items from the shop. Will check this out.
I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?
I've always liked the idea of this sort of thing, but the benefits of using something like this almost never outweigh the costs as compared to just eyeballing the pantry and winging the meal planning on short timescales. The system starts to become the point of the effort rather than just a tool to better achieve household goals.
Unless you're dealing with a substantial household or some sort of communal living environment (lots of roommates, half-way house, dorm) or doing a lot of entertaining, the benefits vs. the effort just leave these things as interesting experiments.
And I do see value in experimenting this way. I am an implementation consultant for actual ERP systems and data entry compliance is a real problem in the corporate world, too. There tends to be benefits to the data entry problem there, but the benefits tend to accrue a few degrees of separation from where the entry work takes place... so those that do the work often don't understand the need or importance. So if you solve some of the data capture problem in a small, low risk household environment, you may be able to apply the lessons learned to larger business systems. For example the more you could capture the data "in flight", like cameras capturing the information as you're putting recently bought groceries away or pulling them out to cook, do that well enough and now the benefits start to be larger in the home... but maybe you can see avenues to reduce the data entry burden in the warehouse, or the data entry processing desks, etc.
But on it's own, using the same old data acquisition patterns as boring old corporate ERP, you're better bet is probably just pen and paper.
> I've always liked the idea of this sort of thing, but the benefits of using something like this almost never outweigh the costs as compared to just eyeballing the pantry and winging the meal planning on short timescales. The system starts to become the point of the effort rather than just a tool to better achieve household goals.
For household usage I think it might be helpful to separate items into categories:
- Frequent use
- Infrequent use & stock needed
- Infrequent use & stock not needed
The first category I wouldn't worry about: you know how much you have stocked due to frequently using it, so just jot it down on a simple shopping list as you feel more stock is needed. Both short and long shelf life items can be placed here, you know when you need more sugar or toilet paper, or when something you use frequently might go bad soon.
The second category would be very good to put in a system like this, complete with expiration dates. These might be emergency supplies and medications, things that are easily forgotten about but shouldn't be lacking at any time. Keeping track and being notified of expiration dates would be pretty important.
The final category is personal choice. Since you don't need a stock of it, then it's non-essential. You could place it in a system like the second category, or you could just throw it on a shopping list when it's running out like the first.
I’ve been doing this with https://www.thingybase.com/, my phone, and a wireless Brother label printer or the past few months. Once you get use to a workflow it’s not that bad, and very handy when you are out and about and need to see what’s in your deep freezer or in storage.
Edit: I noticed a few people have signed up and are kicking the tires. Please let me know what you’d like to see built for this thing and give feedback in this thread. At the top of my list is: (1) a phone app, (2) better onboarding (3) more fields for quantity, units, custom, etc. (4) attach photos to items, (5) messaging/chat/threads for each item so people can coordinate better on inventory, (6) one-click to “create a posting to sell an item on Craigslist/etc” for getting rid of a thing and, (7) a way of loaning items to friends and showing them what’s available for loan.
I think this sort of inventory system combined with automatic updates (a la Amazon Go store style OCR embedded in smart fridges, etc) would go a long way. Have always thought this would be useful, but agreed the amount of energy required to manually update everything would be unsustainable.
Agreed that this would have to be a smart vision system that can scan the barcode, and maybe the shelves are attached to a scale to determine weight of items as they are placed back in. With that information you could determine size of a jar of mayo along with its current weight to estimate amount of mayo remaining.
Meats and vegetables would still be a challenge though, but perhaps object recognition could help with that.
Fridges are already overpriced for what even the fancy ones can offer, I imagine we're not there yet to incorporate multi-camera vision systems with beefy AI processors at commodity prices yet.
I guess you don't have to actually use all the features all the time. I'm doing some of this stuff using anylist where I've got recipes / meal planning / shopping list and it works pretty well. I don't care about keeping stock, but instead every time make a full shopping list, go to the kitchen, and remove things I already have.
Other features could be useful though - The list of batteries could be nice. House tasks as well.
Agree, I love the idea and wanted to make this work for my home, but from personal experience I'd say most people would find this more trouble than it's worth.
I wrote something very similar to this a couple years ago for our household. It runs on a raspberry pi and uses a barcode scanner and when we go shopping we scan everything in and then scan things out as we use them. We live far away from town and shopping trips are rare, big all day events. It's easy to forget to scan things out and then things that don't have barcodes like vegetables are hard to track so we don't bother. Manually entering it all in and then remembering to remove it while cooking is too much trouble (we tried).
Agreed. If there was some kind of tech like Amazon's just walk out idea that could automate keeping track of everything it would be great. But having to do this stuff manually kills it. It's the same problem I have with personal money mangers; I have to manually import my bank transactions and then further manually categorize and label them (I've scripted some but can't do most) for it to properly work and give me good graphs and breakdowns.
THis is a similar challenge to the widespread problem of tracking expenses for small business. None of the solutions involve manually hand-bombing all the data, so maybe there is another angle that could eb tackled?
Wow I'm so happy to have found this. Have you considered clubs, restaurants, cafes etc as a target market? If you wanted to start earning some revenue to host it I think there could be an opportunity more so than home users.
We had started down the track of building a basic version of this for our ski club using MS "Power Apps". Our basic process is:
1. Pre-season: estimate requirements based on previous years and do a few large orders with various suppliers for delivery to coincide with the annual food lift (we can't drive all the way to our club). Primarily this is meat and non perishables such as tinned/packaged items, toileteries and cleaning products.
2. Every few days during the season: perform a stock take of what's on-hand in the club. Send to the catering officer.
3. Catering officer orders according to his/her assessment of requirements. Mainly this will be perishables such as fruit/veges, eggs, bread, milk but later in the season may include other items
4. Items are delivered to common stock room and carried up the mountain by club members. Items are checked off the order list provided by the catering officer and added to various storage areas (fridges/freezers, store room, kitchen pantry etc).
Based on a quick run through the demo system I think grocy will meet our requirements for managing consumables.
Additionally club members staying on a particular night are assigned duties by the lodge leader e.g. breakfast dishes, vegetable prep, cooking dinner. We may be able to use the "Chores" function to help with that.
Personally for home use I would not use this because it would not be practical for our family.
Regarding an additional feature: I would recommend looking at Cozi which we use for a shared family calendar which is really valuable for us. I imagine it would be fairly trivial to add that feature to Grocy.
I'll let you know how we got on with the club. Thanks and hope that helps.
I mean no offense, but the consumer version (as OP linked) strikes me as FOSS's answer to the IoT Fridge, a wholly unnecessary device itself.
I'm all about freeing mental bandwidth, but if you can't remember whether or you bought a piece of salmon yesterday, or if you can't be fussed to read the expiration date on a milk carton--adding "extreme attention to minor details" and "tedium" to the mix is not going to help.
The right idea here is optimizing restaurant workflows to minimize food waste/deal with seasonal availability/delivery schedules/etc./etc. Take that and slap a nice frontend + tier 1 tech support on top of that? Baby, you got a stew going.
Personally, as a pedant, I actually find this really useful for my current, home situation. :| thanks
I appreciate the community effort but this thing is waaay too unfocused. Batteries, chores and a todo list?
I've been using an app called Cinnamon to handle grocery shopping. The general idea is similar: define a bunch of things you want to keep in stock in your pantry. Every two weeks before a shopping run I do a sub-five minute scan. The app groups by category, which usually helps keep it fast. Anything I'm low on swipe left and it's on the buy list.
In the grocery store, swipe left again as you buy and it's in the cart. Swipe right for 'next time.' (After a certain amount of time, anything in your cart is presumed to have moved back into the pantry, and anything in next time moves to buy list). For multiperson households, you could split the buy list construction from the acquisition.
I guess the key realization here is that data entry is simpler if you only check before planned grocery store runs, and if you can predict how much you need on hand to last between shopping runs. For toiletries its a pretty quick 'do I have an unopened one still?' For food I know some people use meal planning but I just keep stuff on hand and wing it -- spices keep for quite a while and meat freezes fine.
This feels like booking a flight to get to my local supermarket within walking distance. I guess it appeals to a certain type but I don't even need a written list to go grocery shopping.
We've been using the amazon hand scanner for a while (feeding into AnyList) and it works pretty well; apart from the minor element of pulling out your phone instead of pressing one button this looks significantly superior. You might look at that combo (well AnyList) to look for opportunities for additional features. Grocy seems to have a lot of other useful functionality.
I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't exposed more of their ERP to the consumer. For example: they know what they have shipped me, so they could manage the expiration dates for me ("subscribe and save" is a much more blunt instrument). They could combine scanning when something needs to be reordered with scanning as you cook to manage recipe, nutrition, and supply levels all at once. If they know you buy diabetic strips they could change recipe recommendations or what macronutrients are reported.
Grocery management solution for my home? Maybe in some poor family with 10 kids and bunch of adults it might make sense (really doubt it) but the last thing I want to do is use computer to figure out if I need to buy something.
Readit News
One of the options to solve the data entry could be: - good quality automatic scanning of receipts (not only individual barcodes) from shops using OCR possibly supported with image recognition for double-checking (can happen that products will be mis-labelled or without quantities, etc) - when ordering on-line, the receipt should be available, so should be also much easier Yet, not always one will have a meaningful receipt available...
Solved the data entry and being able to predict own's supply needs would be also great to have a up-to date management of the inventory. Here are even more challenges on the tracking of the available goods at home, where these are and how many items (and in what state, expiration date, etc) would require most probably implementing different solutions from IoT (connected cameras, sensors, etc.).
Then, having a connected home with own groceries supplies under control, one can then automate further the shopping process with feeding-back the information about own's demand to on-line groceries one is subscribed to. This can enable customer subscription plans, and for retailer keeping a possible continuous flow of goods. This could be really really useful especially for upcoming months, when it seems like we are expected to spend a bit more time at home rather than usual, hopefully not fighting in the local shops for the last rolls of the new white paper gold.
$(".icon-button-children").each((index, item) => ($(item).click())) // expand all items
$(".LinesEllipsis ").each((index, item) => console.log(item.innerText)) // record the stuff
on https://www.walmart.com/account
The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose.
In the end, I opted for manual databases too, but they're pain to keep up-to-date. I still think there's a lot of value in a database for all-or-nothing style ingredients, but it was enough to deter me. I'm glad someone is less lazy.
[1]: https://www.libib.com/
Definitely. Or, even, just taking some snacks to another room, and later placing it back to an 'intelligent' cupboard, let's say. In extreme cases, one may need be under a constant tracking at home.
But, simplifying, another option may be to use an improved voice assistant when cooking. One would need then to interact with the VA to note and confirm the stuff used. Improved VA, in essence, would try to 'understand' the activities and interact, instead of being a passive one (as most of currently are), that one needs to say commands. This would require adding it access to camera and maybe other sensors available at 'smart' home. Definitely a lot of interesting and challenging problems to tackle not forgetting too about the user privacy part.
I think the key is the meal planning. The recipes need to bulk manage the inventories and list as meals are prepared and upcoming. The recipes would need to be cleaned up and normalized.
Deleted Comment
My solution would be to read frames from a smartphone's camera until a barcode is detected. This can be achieved with eg Firebase ML, on-device. If a barcode database lookup gives a product, put it on the in/out list. If not, send the frame to a product recognition vision service. This could be Google Cloud Vision AI, but they don't give you access to their product set that backs Google Lens.
Finally, provide controls to adjust the number of items on the in/out list
I thought about OCRing supermarket receipts too but these differ so greatly in layout etc. per country I figured it's not the way to go
Edit: Problem you run into as not all of this can be done on-device is privacy concerns of coursem just my thoughts on what interface I'd like to have
https://world.openfoodfacts.org/
https://product-open-data.com/
I just tested Product Open Data using the barcode from a can of Coconut Milk from my cupboard, and it returned the correct product (including a photograph) and the name of the brand and their owner.
Edit: updated to add Open Food Facts, given that Open Product Data appears no-longer-maintained
People usually shop at the same places and the same things, so they could identify the products in the receipts once and then only update the new ones. Also,You could crowdsource it.
It turns out that with an Amazon Prime account and shopping at Whole Foods the entire history is available down the the SKU, quantity, and date. Discovered this when going to order a delivery for the first time in the COVID-19 outbreak - aside from the generic shopping selection, we can also pick from our own previous purchases.
I haven't checked if there are other methods to access the data (e.g., with the app, or some history list), but there's the potential for at least some screen-scraping, and maybe they'll make the history available in a downloadable file if we pester them? It'd certainly help both this app and making their stores a bit 'stickier'.
On the other end of the system, I'm hoping to implement a way to bulk load recipes into grocy, using the open source recipe-scrapers[0] library.
[0] - https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers
Also, costs would simply explode making the whole solution a non-starter for a lot of households.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
I've always liked the idea of this sort of thing, but the benefits of using something like this almost never outweigh the costs as compared to just eyeballing the pantry and winging the meal planning on short timescales. The system starts to become the point of the effort rather than just a tool to better achieve household goals.
Unless you're dealing with a substantial household or some sort of communal living environment (lots of roommates, half-way house, dorm) or doing a lot of entertaining, the benefits vs. the effort just leave these things as interesting experiments.
And I do see value in experimenting this way. I am an implementation consultant for actual ERP systems and data entry compliance is a real problem in the corporate world, too. There tends to be benefits to the data entry problem there, but the benefits tend to accrue a few degrees of separation from where the entry work takes place... so those that do the work often don't understand the need or importance. So if you solve some of the data capture problem in a small, low risk household environment, you may be able to apply the lessons learned to larger business systems. For example the more you could capture the data "in flight", like cameras capturing the information as you're putting recently bought groceries away or pulling them out to cook, do that well enough and now the benefits start to be larger in the home... but maybe you can see avenues to reduce the data entry burden in the warehouse, or the data entry processing desks, etc.
But on it's own, using the same old data acquisition patterns as boring old corporate ERP, you're better bet is probably just pen and paper.
Sounds a bit like GTD and other systems :/.
Deleted Comment
- Frequent use
- Infrequent use & stock needed
- Infrequent use & stock not needed
The first category I wouldn't worry about: you know how much you have stocked due to frequently using it, so just jot it down on a simple shopping list as you feel more stock is needed. Both short and long shelf life items can be placed here, you know when you need more sugar or toilet paper, or when something you use frequently might go bad soon.
The second category would be very good to put in a system like this, complete with expiration dates. These might be emergency supplies and medications, things that are easily forgotten about but shouldn't be lacking at any time. Keeping track and being notified of expiration dates would be pretty important.
The final category is personal choice. Since you don't need a stock of it, then it's non-essential. You could place it in a system like the second category, or you could just throw it on a shopping list when it's running out like the first.
Edit: I noticed a few people have signed up and are kicking the tires. Please let me know what you’d like to see built for this thing and give feedback in this thread. At the top of my list is: (1) a phone app, (2) better onboarding (3) more fields for quantity, units, custom, etc. (4) attach photos to items, (5) messaging/chat/threads for each item so people can coordinate better on inventory, (6) one-click to “create a posting to sell an item on Craigslist/etc” for getting rid of a thing and, (7) a way of loaning items to friends and showing them what’s available for loan.
Meats and vegetables would still be a challenge though, but perhaps object recognition could help with that.
Fridges are already overpriced for what even the fancy ones can offer, I imagine we're not there yet to incorporate multi-camera vision systems with beefy AI processors at commodity prices yet.
Other features could be useful though - The list of batteries could be nice. House tasks as well.
I wrote something very similar to this a couple years ago for our household. It runs on a raspberry pi and uses a barcode scanner and when we go shopping we scan everything in and then scan things out as we use them. We live far away from town and shopping trips are rare, big all day events. It's easy to forget to scan things out and then things that don't have barcodes like vegetables are hard to track so we don't bother. Manually entering it all in and then remembering to remove it while cooking is too much trouble (we tried).
We had started down the track of building a basic version of this for our ski club using MS "Power Apps". Our basic process is: 1. Pre-season: estimate requirements based on previous years and do a few large orders with various suppliers for delivery to coincide with the annual food lift (we can't drive all the way to our club). Primarily this is meat and non perishables such as tinned/packaged items, toileteries and cleaning products. 2. Every few days during the season: perform a stock take of what's on-hand in the club. Send to the catering officer. 3. Catering officer orders according to his/her assessment of requirements. Mainly this will be perishables such as fruit/veges, eggs, bread, milk but later in the season may include other items 4. Items are delivered to common stock room and carried up the mountain by club members. Items are checked off the order list provided by the catering officer and added to various storage areas (fridges/freezers, store room, kitchen pantry etc).
Based on a quick run through the demo system I think grocy will meet our requirements for managing consumables.
Additionally club members staying on a particular night are assigned duties by the lodge leader e.g. breakfast dishes, vegetable prep, cooking dinner. We may be able to use the "Chores" function to help with that.
Personally for home use I would not use this because it would not be practical for our family.
Regarding an additional feature: I would recommend looking at Cozi which we use for a shared family calendar which is really valuable for us. I imagine it would be fairly trivial to add that feature to Grocy.
I'll let you know how we got on with the club. Thanks and hope that helps.
I'm all about freeing mental bandwidth, but if you can't remember whether or you bought a piece of salmon yesterday, or if you can't be fussed to read the expiration date on a milk carton--adding "extreme attention to minor details" and "tedium" to the mix is not going to help.
The right idea here is optimizing restaurant workflows to minimize food waste/deal with seasonal availability/delivery schedules/etc./etc. Take that and slap a nice frontend + tier 1 tech support on top of that? Baby, you got a stew going.
Personally, as a pedant, I actually find this really useful for my current, home situation. :| thanks
I've been using an app called Cinnamon to handle grocery shopping. The general idea is similar: define a bunch of things you want to keep in stock in your pantry. Every two weeks before a shopping run I do a sub-five minute scan. The app groups by category, which usually helps keep it fast. Anything I'm low on swipe left and it's on the buy list.
In the grocery store, swipe left again as you buy and it's in the cart. Swipe right for 'next time.' (After a certain amount of time, anything in your cart is presumed to have moved back into the pantry, and anything in next time moves to buy list). For multiperson households, you could split the buy list construction from the acquisition.
I guess the key realization here is that data entry is simpler if you only check before planned grocery store runs, and if you can predict how much you need on hand to last between shopping runs. For toiletries its a pretty quick 'do I have an unopened one still?' For food I know some people use meal planning but I just keep stuff on hand and wing it -- spices keep for quite a while and meat freezes fine.
It's not like an overkill of shopping list, it's more of a small scale inventory management.
I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't exposed more of their ERP to the consumer. For example: they know what they have shipped me, so they could manage the expiration dates for me ("subscribe and save" is a much more blunt instrument). They could combine scanning when something needs to be reordered with scanning as you cook to manage recipe, nutrition, and supply levels all at once. If they know you buy diabetic strips they could change recipe recommendations or what macronutrients are reported.
https://developer.kroger.com/reference/