I wrote on Monday about what it’d be like to have a web api into a supermarket’s online shopping system. I’ve been tanking about a non-shopping app that would be able to use that.

One of the biggest pains about trying to accurately track your dietary intake is searching through the database on whatever service you’re using, discovering that they don’t have your brand of frozen peas, hoping that the generic one is OK and using that even though you count in grams and they count in cups or ‘portions’ (whatever that means!).
This pretty much ignores the way that we choose food in real life. I go to the cupboard where my food is¹ and pick something from what I’ve got. Then I deplete my stock of that stuff by eating it.

I know that the supermarket knows what I have ² and that they know the nutritional information for each of those items too. They just don’t make that information available to me in any sort of useful way. I’m not suggesting that this needs some kind of NFC enabled smart fridge, just that the food tracking database knows what you have, and makes it easy for you to pick from your existing store of food, as well as picking from the wider database.

If you wanted you could wire this into a pantry app that could tell you what you have, when it’s going to go bad, when you are likely to run out based on average consumption and develop shopping lists. That could go very well for any particular super market who invented it as it would drive loyalty through making it easier to live within their particular ecosystem.