Reducing food waste by turning "what's about to expire?" into "what can I make tonight?"
People usually know something in their fridge is about to expire. What they don't know is what to make with it, so they default to the same recipes or lose time scrolling recipe blogs, and the food goes bad anyway. We called this recipe paralysis.
Smart Pantry tracks what you own, surfaces what's expiring first, suggests recipes that use those ingredients, and builds a grocery list for anything missing. An optional LLM layer suggests creative substitutions based on what's actually in your pantry. We shipped a working command-line prototype in three weeks, tested on a 1,000+ item dataset.
The idea started in the dining hall, in a conversation about how much food dining halls must waste. That turned into reflecting on our own habits: living alone, cooking for ourselves, forgetting food in the back of the fridge, then scrounging the internet for a recipe and ending up back at the same few dishes we always make.
We wanted to know whether this was just us, so we interviewed a range of people with different cooking lives:
We asked questions like "When you look into your fridge or pantry, what's the most annoying thing you experience?" One answer captured the pattern:
"I always forget to check expiration dates until I need the item... at that point, I know I need to use it, but can't always think of how to use it before it goes bad."
What we learned:
| Friction | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Out of sight, out of mind | Items in the back of the fridge get discovered too late to use |
| The creativity gap | People default to the same recipes, or can't find one recipe that uses several expiring ingredients at once |
| The search tax | Recipe blogs bury the recipe under life stories, then call for something you don't have |
The goal: shift people from reactive searching to proactive guidance, helping them "feed multiple birds with one scone" by pairing several expiring ingredients in one meal.
Interviewees also bought duplicates ("I often buy duplicates because I don't look in the back of the pantry"). We decided this was better solved by behavior and storage, like organizing the pantry, than by software. Search could help, but only if someone checked the app before every shopping trip, so we kept it out of scope.