It would be great to solve this problem but I’m afraid the overhead work needed to keep this system up to date would be too high or too high for some family members to be worth it, e.g. maybe a member of the family uses up the last butter and you are unaware of this so you miss to buy it resulting in that the recipe for the evening is not possible anymore
Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
111–120 of 152 posts
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#112The main challenge (as other pointed out) is in the data entrey (and update). I see the options as:
Grocery Input (easiest):
- Receipt Scanning and OCR - Easiest as people don't change supermarkets and groceries too often, so identify once the item in the receipt and it will be always recognized.
- Bar Code Scanning - Also possible but too much work to scan each item, and some items don't have a code.
- Visual Recognition - Video Camera or periodic photos of the grocery storage, hard to do.
- RFID tags and portals - I dream that one day barcode will be substituted by RFID tags, then it would be feasible to have a portal wherever you keep your groceries.
- API - If any supermarket offers that sort of thing for receipt data
Grocery Update/Usage (Hardest):
- Recipe usage - By the estimated usage of every recipe you make (like Grocy tries to do), but that doesn't cover everything that is not on recipes (like cleaning products)
- Visual Recognition - The same as above, if it can recognize groceries going in, it can recognize groceries going out
- RFID tags and Portals - The same dream as above
- ML - By the frequency of your product purchase, a machine learning model might be able to predict when you should buy a new item.
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#113Amazing tool. It'd be nice if the default configuration included some basic recipes and required items or if there was a way to import recipes. Even nicer would be a parser tool that would accept a URL from any recipe website and import that recipe with its image and all the items and their location in grocery store isle, etc
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#114The main challenge (as other pointed out) is in the data entrey (and update). I see the options as: Grocery Input (easiest): - Receipt Scanning and OCR - Easiest as people don't change supermarkets and groceries too often, so identify once the item in the receipt and it will be always recognized. - Bar Code Scanning - Also possible but too much work to scan each item, and some items don't have a code. - Visual Recogn…
All this solution only solve one half of the problem, which is input. But there's also the other half which is marking them as you use the items. Yet another part which also needs to be considered is the separate input for the expiration tracking. The latter may be solvable if you approximate lengths for each product in a database, and you assume that the product you bought is starts at 0.
But yeah, even if you can simplify the first part as your post describes, there's still a lot more work to maintain the data beyond that.
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#115I freaking applied for HN with this idea and was rejected.. years ago. Called “standard pantry”
This doesn't validate the idea, if that's what you're implying. To be necessarily negative, this sort of product has appeared countless times. It fills a need that people just don't have. I have four kids, a wife, a dog, a skinny pig and a bearded dragon. I can internalize shopping lists, as does my wife. It is incredibly rare that we even send reminders to each other of things. The idea of creating and managing an i…
Furthermore, the idea of then tracking each thing I use/consume (just to keep the inventory count right) sounds mind-numbingly tedious.
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#116I've been writing such a web-based self-hosted grocery and household management system for the last 6 (and depending at how you look at it - 20) years. It's a tough problem but well worth it. I share my system (which is very difficult to actually release) here in the hopes of giving people ideas, or if anyone wants to work with me. Just fixed a bug in the home inventory component, and am dreading working to integrate purchase management with shopping receipts (both online and local) with inventory. Very tough problem indeed:
https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner
https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner#a-few-screenca...
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#117This is a cool concept, but in addition to all of the concerns other people have voiced, I have a very specific problem: I've been trying to go "zero waste" and reduce packaging as much possible. This means there is no package to scan, I'm just buying in bulk and putting stuff into bags/jars. There's also no clear expiration date, which is actually somewhat troubling these days, but so far I haven't had bulk stuff go…
Another thread showed his project that printed labels with QR codes that might be a good fit if you're willing to compromise sticker labels in your zero waste goals.
I use frog tape and a sharpie. After a year+ I'm still on my first roll of frog tape.
If you really want to go zero waste you could with a some sort of color coding system like bread clips use.
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'Open Food Facts' and 'Open Product Data' projects could be of interest for barcodes: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://product-open-data.com/ I just tested Product Open Data using the barcode from a can of Coconut Milk from my cupboard, and it returned the correct product (including a photograph) and the name of the brand and their owner. Edit: updated to add Open Food Facts, given that Open Product Data…
Yeah tried it with a variety of products. It doesn't know about enough products, makes entry unreliable. Think of utmost importance here is that the entry works very reliably, if I have to fallback to manual entry on every fifth product, that sucks
If you contribute to Open Food Facts though, you're helping contribute to the database, making it better for everyone. An API to contribute directly from the app would make that super awesome.
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#119I love the idea of this, but in reality I can’t imagine the time and energy required to scan and keep everything up-to-date is offset by the benefits. Perhaps a current user can prove me wrong?
What about a feature where you scan your receipt and it prompts you for expiry for relevant items? (Dairy etc)
Re: Grocy: web-based, self-hosted grocery and household management
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I had dreamed of a Libib[1] for my kitchen, but knew I would have to do all the painful data adding and it was too much of a bother. The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume wi…
> The other big challenge I never resolved was how you'd account for e.g. using 1/4 cup of flour out of a bigger volume. Or taken to its extreme, cooking oil. How do you know how much your 'splash' is? You can't predict the remaining volume without a lot of fiddling to measure it and that defeats the purpose. Definitely. Or, even, just taking some snacks to another room, and later placing it back to an 'intelligent'…
My naive solution, assuming a sufficiently "smart" home, would be to have each shelf be an accurate scale. If it's sensitive enough, it should be able to detect the weight of what was consumed.