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cupboards, fridge and freezer (you can add things by barcode, receipt/cupboard photo, or voice), shows you what's going out of date, and keeps your shopping list.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.

Also agree your post and answers are very clearly copy and pasted from AI. It makes it feel ingenuine.

I couldn't be bothered with it. I open the cupboard and look when I do my weekly stock take before ordering my grocery shopping.

I use ChatGPT for this kind of thing. Look in the cupboard and fridge, see some courgettes that look a bit sorry for themselves, random tins of pulses and a jar of olives….put what I’ve got into AI, ask it to suggest a meal I could make (it knows my preferences as I’ve already saved them) and it gives me a few suggestions I can then interact with to tailor them more to my tastes. So apologies, I don’t see the need for this and wouldn’t use it. Uploading the food sounds a huge chore and would put me off.

I’m confused how it would work with a family all raiding the cupboards and fridge at various times, would you have to train them all to report any use to the app?
My DH eats random stuff in the middle of the night if he’s had a few drinks, there’s no way he’d remember to record what he ate! I have trained him to put the empty tin/packet or whatever on the side if he’s used the last of something so I can add it to my shopping list but that’s about as good as it will get I reckon.

I like the name Mother Cupboard.
I'd never use an App like this becz I always decide what to eat based on the oldest items in the fridge. I did manage to let some cheese go mouldy recently, I suppose.
I pretty much ignore use-by dates, too.
I shop in many different places so tie up with Nectar wouldn't (or other loyalty scheme) wouldn't help.

Thanks for your feedback. It is just me working from home. I came up with an idea that people seemed to like. And it is really great to get critical reviews of all aspects of the app. She did respond within 5 minutes of me posting, which I thought was prettty speedy.

Thanks, yes that's how I came up with the idea for the app. I was at a loss to what to make and was about to get takeaway. I found it tedious to keep putting items in to AI. So, I wanted to make it as easy as possible to upload your receipt or take a snap of the cupboard. I also wanted to give Mother Cupboard a warmer feel that knows what you like and why you can save favourite recipes. If you're in the supermarket and and wondering if you do have those plum tomatoes still, then you could just check the app. There was also the things hidden at the bottom of the freezer that wouldn't be forgotten about.

Thank you for your criticism. To be honest it is something I have put together that will be functional and solve the problem of having a lovely meal to cook at home when you think you have nothing and are considering splurging on Deliveroo. Because it is just me with an idea, the glitzy design is something that will come later.

Having an option to increase the font size is a great idea. Thank you

@MotherCupboardMichael when you reply on this thread it's not clear who you are replying to. You can either use the Quote option to quote the person's whole post, or in your reply you can use the "@" and their username to tag them, as I have tagged you at the start of this post. Otherwise it can be really hard to work out who you are talking to.

Are you using AI to generate your posts?

Thanks — I'll take the name as a win at this point 😄 Sounds like your system works though, fair play. It's the households without your discipline I built it for (mine included). Also, I was thinking the tie up may come from those grocery delivery companies that can deliver within the hour. That way if a recipe suggestion is missing a key ingredient you tap a button and its on its way

@Hotandpointy Ha! No, if it depended on everyone logging their 2am raids it'd be doomed. It's more forgiving than that though: the weekly shop goes in from a photo of the receipt, and if the odd tin mysteriously vanishes overnight nothing breaks — you just delete it when you notice. And honestly your empty-packet-on-the-side system is most of the way there already. The app version of that is just the shopping list synced to both your phones, so the packet gets skipped and it lands on the list before it's forgotten.

@SilenceInside thank you for the tip. I thought clicking at the bottom of the post I was replying to, responded to that. D'oh!

Most perishables like meat and chicken go straight in the freezer if not being used that day. Leftovers are the things that tend to get forgotten, I cook probably enough plus a bit so there are often a bit of leftovers like a slice of meat and a few potatoes or a bit of the casserole and a few veg that then get put in a box in the fridge for a quick lunch.

@QwestSprout KitchenPal is the closest cousin, and it's good at the inventory side — solid barcode scanning, shared lists. The difference is mostly what happens next: it's less interested in what you actually cook with it all. Mine is built the other way round — the point is opening it at 5pm and having it turn whatever's in the fridge into three proper dinners with steps and quantities, then it takes the ingredients off your list when you cook. Plus a couple of quality-of-life things like photographing your receipt to load the whole shop in one go, and it's UK-first (grams, use-by dates, dinners British people actually make)

Sidekick I'd call the opposite direction of travel — it starts from recipes and sends you shopping for them, and it's very good at that. Mine starts from what's already in the house. Depends which problem you've got, honestly — "what shall we cook this week?" is Sidekick's; "what can I make out of THIS?" is mine.

I understand where you are coming from, but your app mixes up a variety of different issues and doesn't solve any of them well (or the problem could be better solved elsewhere).

1. An inventory of food you have in - having to manually track and update food in/out means this app increases workload rather than reduces it - your app is not fit for purpose.
2. A meal planning app - many other apps with vastly better funtionality available at the same pricepoint or less - you app is not fit for purpose as it offers vastly less than competitors
3. Reducing food waste - your app doesn't offer anthing that isn't readily available for free using AI or even simple googling.

I think you need to bin this app and go back to the drawing board.

You need to build an app that offers a quick and easy solution to a problem that people have, that hasn't already been solved by basic AI, or a host of other already well developped apps that have saturated the market.

You need to do your market research and feasibility studies before investing time and energy into building the product.

You need to consider your pricepoint. Ideally initially launch a new app for free for a number of years, since your early adopters are basically your beta-testers who can give you feedback to help you refine your product. £3.99 per month is the pricepoint of a professional, well developed app once all the bugs have been ironed out and the product can offer users some real value. It's unrealistic for your current offering.

I did try to design the camera so it takes in the use by date as well as what it is and amount. But sounds like it needs some more work. You should be able to generate recipe ideas from as little as three items. It will then suggest the other things you need to get to put it together

Wouldn’t use this.
Far too much input required and for something that is supposed to address a problem, it is actually creating much more admin and would be more time consuming for the user. I also can’t see many people using this app when there are already other tools that can help with meal planning etc. ChatGPT is an example of this - you even use it for answering comments here, rather than bothering to respond yourself.

The name, log, font etc are not appealing - very old fashioned with a childish tone.

I am very unlikely to pay for an app to use these days as there are so many; I would be more likely to try a free one unless I was 100% sure it was something I needed.

You need to rethink everything here - great if it works for you, but I don’t see it being appealing to others and unlikely to take off as a business venture.

Thank you for your taking such time to look into the app. I'll level with you on where I've landed: the upkeep point and the pricing question I'm taking away and will think about. You're not the first in this thread to raise the first one, and that pattern is exactly what I paid to hear.
I think there's a real gap between "meal planner" (which it isn't, and I've clearly been describing it badly) and "what can I make out of what's actually in the house". So I'd rather fix how I tell that story and how the app teaches itself before I decide the idea was wrong. If I'm still getting this feedback in six months, you were right and I'll say so. Thanks for the going-over, it's been more useful than a focus group.

If I have to scan everything I buy snd then tell it when I e used it then I will know what's in the fridge already? Do I not get it?

yes that's pretty much part of how it works. But then there's those things at the bottom of the freezer that completely forgot about. I had some pomegranate molasses in the back of the cupboard, bought for one recipe and never to be used again. It was pretty satisfying to use it! Recipes can be quite a waste of money in that sense.

But you're not taking on board that "What I can make with what's already in the house" has already been solved, for free, by AI. Anyone tech savvy enough to use an app will know that they can google/ask Alexa/use Claude/ Chat GPT for free.

Your premise that there's tons of people staring at their fridges, unable to work out what to cook and unable to google/use AI to find a recipe is basically flawed.

I'm trying to find nice ways of saying this, but you're not listening. So to be clear, your app is a dud. It's not offering anything that hasn't already been done better and cheaper elsewhere. You are wasting your time and energy pursuing this. Details like the name/branding/layout are all irrelevent at this stage. As it stands, it simply doesn't have any useful value. You need to go back to the drawing board and develop something more innovative that actually solves a problem that people have that hasn't already been solved by other, better apps or AI.

Sorry to be blunt, but you're just not taking on board the feedback you've been given.

You can already do this. The scanner isn't fussy about what it reads — screenshot your Ocado or Tesco order confirmation and upload it, and it pulls the items in the same as a paper receipt. Which makes me think I've named the feature badly, because you're not the first person today who'd never have guessed that from "receipt scanning".

Is it a person using AI to respond, or the whole thing is AI? Either way it looks crap.

"a pleasing sense of total control over what's in the cupboards" is the best description of the app anyone's written.
You've described exactly how it's meant to be used. Nobody should be logging Penguins and crisps — core ingredients only, and yes, you can knock off a guesstimate ("half a loaf went on packed lunches") rather than accounting for every slice. After 35 years you clearly don't need it — but your DH borrowing your brain for it is precisely the situation I had in mind.
I had a friend in my gfs support whatsapp group say her hubby has ADHD and always makes the same thing. Not any more :-)

But they already have record of what they have in, in their Tesco or Ocado app. Why would they want to create the work of scanning it in, just so they can look at in another app?