Most food that expires at home isn’t wasted because people don’t care. It’s wasted because they forget about it. A chicken breast that needs to be used by Thursday is easy to forget about by Wednesday night. A carton of cream bought for one recipe can sit at the back of the fridge for two weeks until someone finds it after its date.
Pantryfy’s expiry tracking is built to stop that from happening. When you add food to your pantry, you can give it an expiry date. Pantryfy keeps track of those dates and shows you which food expires soon, while there’s still time to cook it.
How expiry tracking works
Every ingredient in your pantry can have an expiry date. You can type the date from the package when you add the ingredient, or accept the default date Pantryfy suggests for that kind of food. Pantryfy’s ingredient database knows roughly how long common kinds of food (meat, dairy, fresh produce, pantry staples) usually keep, so you don’t have to remember how long a block of tofu lasts. A suggested date is only an estimate, so when the package has a date, use that one.
Once an ingredient has a date, Pantryfy keeps track of it for you. The pantry page has an “Expiring soon” filter that shows only the food with an expiry date coming up. Check it before a grocery trip or before you plan the week, so you can see what to use in the next few days. The pantry also lists food that expires within three days under “Use soon”, with the soonest first.
Push notifications: a reminder you don’t have to check for
The Expiring soon filter helps when you remember to look. A push notification reminds you when you don’t.
On the Free plan, Pantryfy sends a push notification at 8am your local time on any day when food in your household’s pantry expires within the next two days. Because it arrives in the morning, you can still plan that day’s dinner around the expiring food. On Pro and Family, the suggestions described in the next section take the place of this daily notification, so you don’t get two reminders about the same food.
You choose which kinds of notifications you get in Settings. Each kind can be turned on or off separately, so you can keep expiry alerts and turn off meal reminders, or the other way round.
From reminder to a drafted plan (Pro and Family)
A notification tells you that food is expiring. On Pro and Family, Pantryfy also drafts a plan for using it.
Pantryfy looks for food that expires within the next three days, a day further ahead than the Free reminder, so there’s time to plan around it. When it finds some, Autopilot drafts a short meal plan that uses those ingredients and puts the suggestion on your Pantryfy home screen. You open the suggestion to review the meals and the shopping list, then approve it or dismiss it. Nothing changes in your meal plan or shopping list until you approve.
Pantryfy watches for two other situations too. If a week on your meal plan has meals but no shopping list, it drafts the shopping list for you to review. If many of the ingredients in your pantry haven’t been updated in three weeks, it suggests a quick check, so your pantry list stays accurate and the suggestions based on it stay useful.
Pantryfy keeps these suggestions quiet. Every suggestion appears on your home screen, but Pantryfy only sends a push notification when one is urgent, for example when several ingredients expire today. A less urgent suggestion waits until you next open the app, so when Pantryfy does send a push, it’s worth looking at.
Here’s the difference in practice. The Free reminder tells you that three ingredients expire soon and leaves the planning to you. A suggestion gives you a drafted plan, such as tomorrow’s dinner built around the chicken and the spinach, and you check it and approve it. These suggestions and the weekly plans drafted by Autopilot are part of Pro and Family.
Dates and quantity: what to use first
Expiry dates are half of the picture. The other half is how much is left. Half a jar of something that expires in two days needs a recipe built around it. A nearly empty jar that expires in two days might get used up anyway.
In Pantryfy, each ingredient in your pantry can show a level that compares what’s left with the amount you added: Plenty, Some, Low or Out. The pantry sorts your food into three groups: Use soon (food that expires within three days), Running low (food that’s Low or Out) and Stocked. Food that expires soon goes under Use soon even when it’s also running low, because it’s better to eat it before you buy more.
Use the dates and levels together. In the Use soon group, check each ingredient’s level. A full bag of something that expires tomorrow is the food most likely to be wasted, so plan a meal around it first.
How expiry dates feed into meal planning
An expiry reminder is most useful when it helps you decide what to cook. Pantryfy uses expiry dates in several places.
When you ask “What can I cook?”, Pantryfy gives priority to recipes that use ingredients expiring soon. If your chicken thighs expire tomorrow, saved recipes that use chicken thighs and other ingredients you already have come near the top of the suggestions.
Autopilot (Pro and Family) also looks at expiry dates when it drafts your week. It aims to use ingredients that expire within the next seven days first, so the draft starts from the food that needs eating, not just from recipes that sound appealing.
The shopping list’s Suggest option looks at the food in your pantry that expires within the next week and can suggest ingredients that help you use it up. The shopping list also shows how much of each ingredient you already have. Before you skip buying an ingredient because it’s in your pantry, check that it hasn’t expired.
When expiry information is missing
Not every ingredient in your pantry will have an expiry date, especially if you add several at once in the pantry chat (“I bought 2 lb chicken, a dozen eggs, and a box of pasta”) without giving dates. Pantryfy suggests a default date where it can. An ingredient with no date can’t trigger an expiry reminder.
The most reliable habit is to add dates while you put your groceries away, because the date is printed on the package in your hand. Start with the food that expires fastest: fresh proteins, dairy and fresh produce. Dates matter less for shelf-stable pantry staples.
Food with an upcoming expiry date shows in the Expiring soon filter whether or not a notification has gone out. Even with push notifications turned off, you can check the filter before you decide what to cook.
A lot of household food waste comes down to timing: food gets forgotten between the day you buy it and the day you remember to use it. An expiry reminder tells you about the food in time to cook it, and planning meals around your pantry helps you actually use it.
For more ways to reduce food waste, the 12-tip food waste guide covers the habits that help before and after you shop. Tracking expiry dates is tip 6.