Pantry: Food Expiry Tracker

Pantry tracks the dates on the food you already own, and tells you what needs
using — once a day, in one notification, not a stream of them.

It is built around one distinction that almost every other app in this category
gets wrong.

USE BY IS NOT BEST BEFORE

Use by is a safety date. It is on raw meat, fish, soft cheese and prepared
salad, and after it the food should not be eaten however it looks. Pantry says
so plainly and does not soften it.

Best before is a quality date. After it, the food is still safe — it may simply
not be at its best. A tin of tomatoes two months past its best before is a tin
of tomatoes. Pantry never calls that expired, never tells you to throw it away,
and keeps counting the days so you can decide for yourself.

Every other tracker has one field called "expiry date" and one word on the
card: expired. That is wrong in both directions at once. It throws away food
that is perfectly good, and it makes the date on the chicken look like a
suggestion.

OPENING STARTS A SECOND CLOCK

"Use within 3 days of opening" is on half the packets in a fridge and no app
reads it for you. Tell Pantry the rule once and mark the packet open, and it
counts whichever date runs out first. An app that only reads the printed date
will happily tell you that the opened cream is fine until March.

THE FREEZER STOPS THE CLOCK

It does not add a guessed six months to the date. Freeze something with four
days left, leave it half a year, take it out: four days left. That is both the
truth and the thing you expect.

ONE NOTICE A DAY

At a time you choose, covering the next few days — three by default, and you
can change it. A week-long window on a full fridge means a notice every single
day, which is how people end up turning notifications off, and an app nobody
hears from is an app that saves nothing.

WHAT ELSE IS IN IT

• Cupboard, fridge and freezer, with a shelf or drawer of your own wording
• Search across names, quantities, shelves and notes
• A quick list of what needs using, separate from the full inventory
• Loose food with no date at all is tracked too — it simply never comes due
• Undo on anything you take off the list by mistake
• Dark theme, and your own language on Android 13 and newer
• Save a copy of everything to a file, and restore it on a new phone

WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No account. No sign-up. No sync. Your pantry is on your phone and nowhere else,
and everything except the ads works in airplane mode.

No camera permission. Barcode scanning sounds useful and is not: a barcode
identifies the product, never the date, so the scan fills in the one field you
did not need help with and leaves you typing the one you did.

No contacts, no location, no photographs of your shopping, and no exact alarm
permission — a date on a packet is a day, not a moment.

Pantry is free and supported by ads. There is one occasional full-screen ad,
never while you are typing and never when you open the app, and you can switch
ads off for a day by watching a video if you would rather.