I'm a carer who built a free food-waste app — would you tell me what it's missing?

[MotherCupboardMichael]

Hello Mumsnet — posting via the Non-member requests board, fee paid!
I'm a carer from south-west London. Between looking after my partner and running a household, keeping on top of what food was in the cupboards was one job too many — I got fed up with binning things I'd forgotten were there. So I built an app called Mother Cupboard. It keeps track of what's in your cupboards, fridge and freezer (you can add things by barcode, receipt/cupboard photo, or voice), shows you what's going out of date, and keeps your shopping list.

To be completely upfront about the money side: the tracking, shopping list and date badges are free forever. There's an optional Premium tier (£3.99 a month) for the extras — meal ideas based on what you've already got in, expiry reminder notifications, and setting up sharing with the rest of your household. Everyone gets the full app free for the first month when they sign up, no card details needed.

I'm not here to sell it to you — I'd like your honest opinions, because busy households are exactly who it's for and I'd rather hear the unvarnished truth now than build the wrong things:

1. How do you currently keep on top of what food you have in — and what's the most annoying part?
2. If you tried an app like this, what would make you delete it within a week?
3. What one feature would make it worth keeping?

If you'd like to have a poke around before answering, it's on both stores — but comments from people who'd never use such an app are just as useful:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mother-cupboard/id6762460788
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mothercupboard.app

(A note for anyone outside the UK: it's only fully launched in the UK at the moment — Ireland, Australia and New Zealand are coming shortly.)

I'll be reading and replying to everything. Thank you — and be as brutal as you like, I'd rather know now.

I'm also a carer for my disabled husband op, with a baby and pregnant with no2. I wouldn't use this.

I would find the extra admin of adding and then marking off when used tedious and time consuming.
I wouldn't have enough fresh short life ood in that it would be worth it - if I'm off in the fridge for milk for tea I can have a quick butchers at the chicken thighs and think right they need eating by tomorrow or whatever.

Thanks for the speedy response — and honestly, this is exactly what I was after.
On the marking-off side: the app does try to kill that job. When it suggests a meal and you cook it, it asks "did you make this?" and then reduces or removes the ingredients from your cupboard itself — so there's no ticking things off one by one. Adding things in is the barcode/receipt-photo/voice bit, which is quick but I'll admit it's not zero effort.
But your bigger point stands — if you don't keep much short-life food in and a fridge glance does the job, no amount of clever deduction earns the app its place on your phone. That's useful for me to hear plainly. Thanks for giving it the thought, and best of luck with number two!

Couple of quick points before I really try to use the app.

I dislike the name, sorry. I also very much dislike the app image/logo with the cartoon style, it feels childish and amateur to me. It's also too busy of an image, on my iPhone I can't really tell what the image is of at the size it displays as.

Another point, the explanatory writing is in incredibly tiny font - I can barely read it! There's no option to make it larger or to change the font/colour which might help.

It’s the adding things in that is putting me off. I did try snapping a photo of my fridge but it didn’t seem to work (also not sure how that would get the use-by / best before dates)

I’d like to be able to look at the meal suggestions without completing the cupboards as well

I've downloaded it, and had a quick look around.

I absolutely should be your target audience, I love organisation and planning and use meal planning apps etc, but I don't really see how your app would help me. Unless I'm missing something, I have to add every item in my fridge/freezer/cupboard, and then manually keep this list up to date by adding/removing items as I go along. So it's basically just a list. What an utter faff to keep it up to date (and track what the other people in my house were using/buying too) it would add to my admin/workload, not streamline it. So much easier to maintain a shopping list and just to look in my fridge/freezer/cupboard before I use my meal planning app (which also auto fills my online shpping trolley and gives me a load of health/nutrtional data).

Did you do any market research before building this? I can't work out who would want this extra admin in their life.

It's a hard No from me, I'm afraid.

The sort of person who forgets about what's in the fridge until it goes off, is also the sort of person who doesn't have the organisational stamina to keep updating an app.

(I say this as I'm very much this sort of person).

It feels like fixing a small burden (wasting food) with a much bigger burden/chore (updating an app).

If you, for example, could team up with the Nectar app, then you'd be on fire. Nectar technically knows what ALL the food in my kitchen is and when it goes off.

Posted twice

So it's AI slop and you can't even be bothered writing your own posts about it...

But presumably most food eaten won't be via the meal planning section of you app. Presumably you're not expecting us to plan each bowl of cereal or slice of toast had for breakfast, each cheese and pickle sandwich made for lunch etc. So the majority of the maintenance of the list is an extra manual job that needs to be done multiple times a day. It would be an enormous task to keep it up to date

What's the difference between your app and KitchenPal? I also feel to a lesser extent the Sidekick app intersects with this.

And when it comes to the "meal planning app" element of it, this market is already full of apps offering a far more sophisticated products.

Personally, the minimum I need from a meal planning app would be the option to pre-fill an online basket at Sainsburies/Asda/Tesco etc, a huge range of high quality recipes, searchable by ingredient, by meal type (e.g low carb, vegan, budget friendly etc), the ability to create and import my own recipes and full nutritional information. An AI meal generator would be good to.

I'm sorry, I really don't think this is a well designed product, and I can't see it catching on. You need to rescope it and add a lot of extra functionality (and develop partnerships with the big supermarkets and big recipe sites etc) before it's fit to be launched.

I'll concede the central point without a fight: as a meal-planning app, Mother Cupboard would lose to the established players, for exactly the reasons you list. Basket integration, big recipe libraries, full nutrition — that market is well served and I'm not trying to out-build it.
Reading your reply back, though, I think I've told my own story the wrong way round in this thread — my fault, not yours. The truth is I didn't build it because I was fed up with wasting food, that came later. I built it for a moment of repeatedly standing in front of a fridge that had plenty in it, convinced there was nothing to eat. The Suggest tab is the whole app, really — it takes what's actually in there and hands you three cookable meals with steps and quantities. The tracking and the dates exist to feed that. If that "there's nothing in" moment isn't one you have, then you're right, it has little to offer you.
So the challenge I'll take away from your posts is: either that moment is common enough to build a business on, or it isn't — and either way I should lead with it instead of dressing the app up as something adjacent to a meal planner. That's worth more than the £30 this thread cost me. Thank you.

Really dislike the app name and graphics. Not going to check the app because I don't think its offering anything I'd ever use. I'm sure you've done your research, but I can't see anything special or unique about the app, sorry.

Hi ChatGPT. Your “Thanks for the speedy response - and honestly this is exactly what I was after.” was a dead giveaway.

Ask whoever wrote your product idea prompt to ask you to respond in future as a critical product manager when designing something that is meant to save time but in fact only adds to the load.

Sorry. It needs A LOT more thought.

I hate to tell you this, but the established meal planning apps have a search for recipes by ingredient option. Not to mention you can just google or use Chat GPT, or even ask Alexa to find recipes using the ingredients you have in.

I think you've built an app to solve a problem that's already been solved by google/AI.

I think some of us do this kind of thing instinctively after 35 years of meal planning for a big household. Therefore we don’t see the need.
My husband, however, seems to think he can use my brain for this kind of stuff, despite me still working and him now part time. So it’s perfectly possible there are takers for this app, people who like spreadsheets and outsourcing their thinking.
It would give DH a pleasing sense of total control over what’s in the cupboards. He’d like it.

As for some of the concerns above, I wouldn’t even bother entering snack foods. Just core ingredients. Save myself some effort and track the important things.

Other families might use it to track packed lunch foods, for example.

Presumably you can guesstimate- enter the amount of bread used in 5 packed lunches and 5 breakfasts, and see what’s left.

The AI replies are hideous

Lot of app developers on MN today.

I wouldn't find this useful at all - speaking as someone who has teenagers, full time job, DH with a big job, animals and additional needs in the mix as well so theoretically target market. Every foodstuff I buy is on my Ocado or Tesco account. It does an auto shopping list. I don't throw out much because I just buy based on a fairly unchanging meal plan and suggested order. I don't know why I would use a food shopping app that wasn't plugged into an online supermarket. I haven't got time to go around typing in barcodes or scanning QR codes. Why would I exchange one potentially interesting job (recipes and meal planning) for one brain dead job (scanning barcodes)?

no I really really wouldn't use this

our food consumption is too complex- we cook from scratch daily including produce from the garden/allotment so one huge factor is - what is ready to be harvested and eaten?
we also have large amounts of shelf stable food which are replenished regularly, eg sacks of flour so I know I always have some basics

we don't really waste food and I can't imagine any app that would be better than me at looking in my fridge and creating a meal from what's there, along with what's in the cupboards

this seems like something for people that eat ready meals

But that's a lot of thinking, tracking, separating, guestimating, manually entering to use an app that's supposed to automate things and make our lives easier. It complicates the process and makes everything take longer.

Yeah, I could guesstimate the number of slices of bread we're likely to us, enter it into the app, remember to change that guesstimate if the adult kids bring a load of friends home after the pub for tea and toast, re-enter the updated figure etc. Or, simply, I could check to see how much bread is left in the cupboard and add it to the (paper) shopping list if we're getting low, which would take less than a second.

What’s putting me off even looking at it is you’re writing via ChatGPT. Your opening post and your subsequent replies are AI generated and that’s a bit jarring

Honestly I could never be bothered! I open my fudge and see what’s there?! Stuff in cupboards last longer and rarely goes out of date. Just seems like unnecessary admin. Maybe if you take a photo of fridge and it suggests dinner??!

I wouldn't use any app by developers who use AI for their marketing copy. If you have a good product you should be able to write about it.

I find it easier to plan the other way, I plan all the meals for each day of the week before I do a shop, so nothing should be wasted (unless we accidentally order a takeaway haha)