Pantry

How the Pantry Works

The pantry is one shared inventory for your whole household. It's what lets Foodex answer questions for you: which recipes are ready to make, what a planned meal is missing, and what actually needs to go on the shopping list.

You don't have to track everything you own for it to be useful. Start with what you buy this week; the pantry mostly maintains itself from there, because buying and cooking through Foodex update it automatically.

Adding Items

On the Pantry page:

1. Search for the ingredient. If it's not in the catalog yet, you can create it on the spot.
2. Set the amount and unit (500g of flour, 2L of milk). Amounts are optional if you just want "we have some".
3. Optionally set a best-before date.

Items also arrive on their own: ticking something off the shopping list adds it, and cooking a recipe with an output (a stock, a dough) books the product in. See below for where stock comes from and goes.

Barcode Scanning

The fastest way to fill the pantry is the scanner: the Scan tab on your phone (or the Scan Barcode button on the Pantry page). When you get home from shopping:

1. Point the camera at a product's barcode. There's a flashlight button for dim kitchens, a camera-switch button, and a field to type the number by hand if a code won't read.
2. Foodex looks the product up (in the Open Food Facts database) and prefills the ingredient, amount, and unit. It matches the product to your ingredient catalog; if nothing matches, a new ingredient is created.
3. Adjust anything, optionally add a best-before date and, if your household has stores set up, the store and price you paid.
4. Add to Pantry. The scanner comes straight back up, so you can work through the whole bag: scan, confirm, scan, confirm.

Works on any device with a camera. Not every product is in the database; for those, confirm the name yourself and it'll still be one tap next time.

Staples

Nobody weighs their salt. Mark the things you always have (salt, oil, water, pepper) as staples with the star button. Staples always count as available, are never deducted when you cook, and never appear on your shopping list, so recipes stop telling you you're missing a pinch of salt.

Best-Before Dates

Set best-before dates on perishables and Foodex turns them into decisions instead of guilt:

• The pantry warns you as dates approach.
• The Plan page has a "Use these up" card and ranks recipe suggestions by what they'd use up, so the warning comes with a dinner attached.
• Cooking uses the oldest stock first, so the milk closest to its date is the one that gets used.
• You can turn on expiry notifications (the bell on the pantry page) to get a push notification before things go off. See Settings.

Where Stock Comes From and Goes

Every change to the pantry is recorded with its reason: bought, cooked, produced by a recipe, thrown out, or corrected by hand. The balance you see is the sum of that history.

That design is why undo really works:

• Untick a bought item on the shopping list and the pantry takes back exactly what that purchase added.
• Undo a cooked meal and every ingredient returns, including taking back whatever the recipe produced.

Merging Duplicates

Two entries for the same thing (one scanned, one typed) can be merged into one; their amounts combine, and the merged item keeps the earliest best-before date, since the combined stock is only as good as its oldest part. If the duplication is in the ingredient catalog itself (two "flour" entries), merge the ingredients instead: see Ingredients & prices.