ISBN-scanning home inventory system?

Factual Questions
21

The cure for this is dates written by you on the package. I don’t have a mongo freezer; just an ordinary side by side in the kitchen.

But I do have a mongo pantry. Every item that goes into it gets year & month written on it with magic marker. Every can, every package of potato chips, every bottle of spice or sauce.

To the degree possible, the new stuff goes in back so the stuff in front is the newest. But every now and then I grab 3 cans of diced tomatoes or whatever and find 2 from last month and one from 3 years ago. Oops.

Doing organized FIFO in a freezer is hard, especially if you’re repackaging stuff, like leftover ham bones saved for stock. But human readable dated labels are your friend.

The other big friend, unless you live out at the end of a very long logistics problem, is to not own 2 years’ worth of perishable food. Own 2-4 weeks’ worth. That makes the size of the problem manageable for the amount of effort you’re willing to put into it.

Right now I have 3 roasts, 3 sets of ribs, a half dozen steaks, and a half dozen pork chops in there. Plus a couple servings each of fish & of shrimp, and about 6 frozen containers of two different stews I made a couple weeks ago. 3 or 4 kinds of frozen veg, and a couple kinds of ice cream.

That inventory is off the top of my head. The counts are not guaranteed to be accurate, but they’re kinda close. The oldest roast is about 4 months old now and overdue to be cooked. Probably later this week.

That’s a manageable problem. If you’ve got 400# of frozen stuff, unless you also own a platoon of mouths to feed you’re making your life harder, not easier, with all that stuff.

Good luck whatever you do. Keep us posted if you have a breakthrough!

22

I can see scanning in groceries as they come into the house. It wouldn’t be that hard as you remove items from the bag and put on the shelf.

I wouldn’t mess with scanning as I used items. It would be quicker to have a formula in excel to depreciate the inventory with a ***mouse click. Say you had 6 cans of tomato paste on the shelf. You prepare to make spaghetti. You pull the items from the pantry. Open the spreadsheet and click the items use. Do them all at one time. Then cook dinner.

I assume for bulk items you would only track when they are used up? A bag of flour for example? You scan it in with the other groceries. Then adjust inventory whenever the bag is used up.

***I know Excel with VBA can recognize mouse click events. Will it recognize a finger press on a phone?

23

An old fashioned system. How it was done before computers. Think recipe cards.

Get two index or business card holders. Or just two boxes if you like. Get or make your own indexes with sticky tabs and mark them as you want. By item type, date purchased, use by date, etc. If you want get fancy, you can use different color index cards for different categories.

Print or write labels that you put on the items in the freezer. When you take something out, take off the label, remove the card from the first box, put the label on the back and put it in the other box. If you want to know what you have, thumb through the first box. If you want to know what you used, thumb through the second box.

If you new order contains the same items, move the used cards back to the first box. Eventually you’ll have to replace the card as it gets too thick with stickers, but it will take a while.

24

I’m sure that’s a setting to recognize a press as a click. In 2000, I had a touchscreen monitor and I set it up in the store I worked at as a “Sample your ringtone” kiosk using Excel. All I had to do was set a press as a mouse click. No drag and drop back then, just point and push! The cursor would just to wherever your finger was. Think Megatouch machine.

25

My answer for this is to write the USE BY or BEST BY dates instead of purchase date. Sometimes the clearance / dented area has a large volume of stuff I would normally use. Even though I have some I get more and use it. Sort the pantry every few weeks to bring the oldest stuff forward. Stuff in the freezer gets the date it was tossed in. I think there are still cherries from 2007 in there.

26

Looking at your OP and your comments, I’m still not 100% clear on what exactly you want from this UPC system. Approaching this like I’m working with you to scope out a project and determine your needs:

You seem to be looking at two separate things.
1) Tracking inventory - Some sort of UPC type scanner should be able to do that. It will be able to confirm you have seven bags of frozen corn in your freezer.

Certainly that’s nice to know but I really don’t know what you get from knowing that. As you note:

Just knowing what you have does not move you closer to this goal.

2) Tracking “Use By” or “Best Before” dates - a UPC tracking system in and of itself won’t do anything for this. The UPC’s are the same for all the frozen corn regardless of when you bought them. There is no way to tell when you purchased individual items.

AFAIK there is no system for consumers or businesses capable of this without some sort of human based separate manual tracking system.

Grocery stores would love some sort of system like this because they still do exactly what they did in the 1920s which is manual stock rotation. When shelves are restocked, older products are manually pulled to the shelf front and newer products are manually put in the back.

So again, if your objective facilitating stock rotation, I agree with the others who’ve also noted a UPC-based tracking system helps at all. You’ll still need to manually track inventory “used by” date and manually rotate your stock.

I personally use a very high-tech sharpie with the date I bought the item.

27

My primary desire is for a scannable check in/check out system that’s less manual than typing an item into a list.

The expiry date part would be a nice to have, where I didn’t have to dig out the item to see the date (or have to add the date to the manual list)

That CozZo app that someone mentioned above does have an expiry date functionality that seems like it could be promising. I test-scanned a box of Raisin Bran and the label came up as “Delicious raisins add a touch of sweetness to crunchy, fiber-packed bran flakes” so hopefully it’s not all like that, lol.

28

So primary is inventory tracking, then that system should work & it’s worth a try.

The problem you will still encounter, as others have noted, is with non-national brands i.e. fresh meat or produce. That’s all individually UPC’d at retail (store) level, so that database wouldn’t work without lots of manual data to set up each and every item you buy that’s non-national.

Even if you were able to manually set up a tracking UPC for those types of products, it would still be a ton of ongoing maintenance since their pack sizes aren’t standardized. Every time you bought a steak you’d still need to manually enter how much it weighs. I’m then imagining your database flagging that a 1.6lb T-bone steak is expiring and you still have to manually go through your every package of steak in your freezer looking for the one that is 1.6 pounds.

Additionally, if you bought steaks at a different store than you normally buy them, you’d have to completely re-create a new UPC data point and then make sure that as you search your database you cross-referenced and for the correct terms i.e.: “T-bone steaks”.

The best-before date function for national brands still strikes me as mostly useless since the database would only tell you that one of your five bags of frozen corn is expiring. You’ll still have to physically hunt through each of the five bags of frozen corn to find it.