Pantry Inventory & Grocy

The "what do I have, what's about to expire, what do I need to buy" page. For the warehouse / SKU side of inventory see Inventory & Asset Management; for shopping list apps see Shopping List Apps; for the recipes that depend on a pantry layer see Self-Hosted Recipe Managers and Meal Planning Apps; for use-by-date logic see Food Safety & Dating; for the open data behind barcodes see Food Databases & Open Food Facts; for selfhost-personal which mentions Grocy briefly.

The OSS default

• ★ ★ Grocy — "ERP for your home" — pantry + recipes + chores + battery tracking + meal planning + shopping. Single-binary PHP app; tiny resource footprint; SQLite or MySQL. The honest call: nothing else is close for tracking the food in your house. MIT.
  • https://github.com/grocy/grocy

Grocy's barcode workflow is the magic: scan a product going in (Open Food Facts userscript fills in nutrition + image), scan it going out, and the system maintains a real-time inventory plus a "best before" reminder. Pair with a $30 Bluetooth scanner or just your phone camera.

For Grocy as a recipe manager specifically, see Self-Hosted Recipe Managers.

Grocy companions / community add-ons

• ★ OFF Userscript / barcode lookup — auto-populates Grocy product details from Open Food Facts.
• Grocy Android / iOS apps (community) — wrap the web UI; some add scanner integrations.
• Home Assistant integration — chores + stock + shopping lists on a dashboard; the gold-standard HA integration for any of these apps. See Home Assistant Add-ons.
• HABarcodes / barcode buddy — bridge a USB / BT scanner to Grocy's API.

Hosted / closed pantry apps

• Pantry Tracker (Mac) — paid one-time; macOS-native; clean.
• Out of Milk — paid + free; pantry + shopping list; mobile-first; aging UI.
• Notable — paid; minimal pantry log.
• Sortly — paid + free; built for small business but families use it for pantry; barcode + photo + custom fields. See Inventory & Asset Management.
• Pantry Check — paid + free; barcode-driven.
• NoWaste — free; expiration-date focused.

Bare-minimum / paper-flavored

• ★ A whiteboard on the fridge — for many households, this is the right answer. Don't skip considering it.
• Apple Notes / Google Keep checklist — see Shopping List Apps.
• Spreadsheet — works; tedious to maintain.

Freezer-specific

• Grocy — supports per-location stock; freezer is just a location.
• NoWaste — freezer-flavored.
• Polar Bear — niche freezer app.
• Date-and-Sharpie a piece of masking tape — the analog answer that beats any app for bulk-cooked meals.

Bar-code scanning options

• ★ Open Food Facts — the open dataset under most of this. ~3M products with barcode + nutrition + ingredients + Nutri-Score. CC0. See Food Databases & Open Food Facts.
• Yuka — paid + free; opinionated health rating; consumer-flavored.
• Phone-camera barcode — every modern app has this; works fine for non-bulk; gets old fast for groceries.
• Bluetooth barcode scanner ($25–$60 on AliExpress) — the workflow upgrade nobody talks about; scan 30 items in 90 seconds.

Date-tracking workflows

• First-In-First-Out (FIFO) — Grocy enforces by default.
• First-Expired-First-Out (FEFO) — Grocy supports; the right model for canned / frozen.
• Use-by vs best-by — Grocy distinguishes; most apps don't. See Food Safety & Dating.

Practical guidance

• ★ Don't pantry-track every condiment. Track the 30 items you actually run out of. Salt, pepper, flour, oil — pencil-and-paper.
• Tie pantry to meal planning or it dies. A pantry list nobody references is wasted effort. Mealie / Tandoor + Grocy = "I have everything for tonight's recipe except parsley."
• Scanner ergonomics matter. Phone scan is fine for adding 5 items; for a full grocery haul, USB or Bluetooth scanner saves real time.
• Start with the freezer. Highest expiration risk, hardest to see, biggest payoff from tracking.
• Annual purge. Once a year, throw out the expired weird stuff and reset the DB. Don't aspire to "perfect inventory forever."

Smart-fridge integrations (mid-2026 reality)

• Samsung Family Hub fridges — Samsung Food / Whisk integration; closed cloud only.
• LG ThinQ — limited; mostly compressor / temp stats.
• Camera-in-fridge models — interesting in theory, hilariously short of useful in practice. Inventory by photo is still a research project.
• For HA-side smart-appliance integrations see Home Assistant Add-ons.

License / pricing

• Grocy: MIT, free, self-host only.
• Pantry Tracker, Out of Milk, Sortly, Pantry Check, NoWaste: closed; varying paid + free tiers.
• Open Food Facts: CC0 dataset; the underlying source most barcode apps query.

Pick this if…

• Default OSS, will commit to barcode workflow: Grocy.
• Mac-native, simpler: Pantry Tracker.
• Already use Sortly for other inventory: extend it to pantry.
• Just expiration tracking: NoWaste or a Sharpie.
• Pen-and-paper still wins: whiteboard on the fridge.
• Inventory at warehouse / SKU scale: see Inventory & Asset Management.