Receipt-Scanned Home Pantry Inventory With Realistic Expiry Estimation (Grocy For Normal Phone Users)
A school-project pitch — 'scan your grocery receipt, get expiry notifications' — drew thoughtful pushback that revealed real demand alongside the obvious technical problems (receipts and barcodes don't carry expiry data). The actual unmet need: a phone-friendly pantry tracker that estimates shelf life from purchase date + product class, without requiring users to self-host Grocy on a homelab. Reduces household food waste, which is the actual customer-felt pain.
Don't promise OCR-from-receipt accuracy you can't deliver. Lead with barcode-scan + a 'when did you buy this' tap. The shelf-life database is the real IP — start with USDA's FoodKeeper and improve from there. And solve the 'how do I tell the app I used the milk up' input friction... that's where every previous attempt died.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
Reddit threads about 'why does my food waste money' show real pain. The receipt-scan idea has technical limits (no expiry data on receipts), but a barcode + product-class lookup ('milk, opened, refrigerated') with a realistic shelf-life database closes most of the gap. The bar is way lower than people assume.