
In my quest to obsessively organize everything in the house, I’ve stumbled upon what looks to be some fabulously useful grocery inventory software: Pantry by ThinkFresher. I’m using Pantry for Mac (free) and Pantry for iPhone ($2.99).
Here’s the scenario. You want to make a recipe, but you aren’t sure if you have all the ingredients. But you’re already at the store! So you buy everything you’ll need, only to find that you already had a giant sack of spelt flour at home, and you sure did not need any more cinnamon.
Alternatively, you’re pretty sure you have a can of pinto beans at home, except that oops, you didn’t, but now you can’t make your awesome stew without trudging back to the store. Sigh.
Pantry seems like the ultimate, overkill answer to this problem. I say overkill because, in the “olden days”, people just got a little organized and checked for ingredients before going out shopping, right? Well, for those of us who are too disorganized to do that, this software promises to get your grocery inventory organized to an obsessive level so you’ll never have to dig through the cupboards again.
The daunting part is taking the initial inventory. Holy crow, how many bottles of different oils and vinegars do we have in here?! And spices! So many spices. That’s going to take a while. But the payoff will be fabulous, especially for more obscure ingredients that we’ve bought for one recipe and then barely used. Don’t want to end up with another jar of coconut oil.
But once you have that inventory done, you’re set (err, aside from keeping quantities and items updated). You’ll never run out of toilet paper again, because Pantry will automatically put it on your shopping list when you’re running low. Phew.
Pantry’s sync capability is a crowning touch. You create a free account for your household’s pantry, and this will keep your grocery inventory synced between your desktop software, and iPhone apps. You’ll be able to check to see if you have cinnamon while you’re in the store, and view your real-time grocery list. So when the hubby calls to ask if we need anything at the store, I can just remind him to check Pantry on his iPhone. Dig it
Now, Pantry is not all sugar and spice (though it is very nice); there are two things I would change:
One is to make the quantity tracking a little easier. I can track how many cans of chickpeas we have by calling each can a unit, fine (though I would love to be able to select “cans” out of the drop-down list). But with stuff that doesn’t come in such clearly defined units, I am still trying to get the hang of the quantities. E.g., dog kibble. I want it to be added to the list when we’re down to a third of a bag. But it looks like my only option is to use cups or kg or some measure like that. I feel it would be more useful to be able to enter a percentage, because I’ll never keep precise measurements on that stuff.
The other thing I would change is that I would like to be able to edit the categories to fit what we buy a little better. We don’t need a “meat” category, because we don’t buy meat. I put the tofu in there, but it’s not really intuitive for us. So I’d love to be able to take it out or rename it. Minor edit, but it’d be nice.
Anyway, overall, I think this one is a winner, if I can keep up with it. But it does make me wonder…is it really necessary to expend all this energy to get the kitchen organized to this level? I guess time will tell.
I’m off to inventory the spice drawer! You can check out Pantry here.