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This App Knows When Your Food Will Go Bad

But it's not quite as smart as you'd hope.

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If you're as absentminded about what's in your refrigerator as I am, then you may find this app useful. It's called The Fridge (real creative, guys) and it keeps track of when your perishable foods expire—even if they aren't actually in your fridge.

The app's goal is to help you avoid wasting food and money. To that end, it will send you alerts when your food is close to the end of its edible life, and let you adjust them to your personal preferences. It also includes handy shopping list and recipe search functionality.

The only downside? Well, it's a big one: You have to manually enter every food item and its expiration date into the app. But that might not be as bad as it sounds. Once you've entered an item the first time, the app remembers, and its expiration info will reappear the next time you add it.

The only downside? You have to manually enter every food item and its expiration date.

We can still see a few issues with this setup, though. For example, how are you supposed to know exactly how long it'll take for a banana to go bad? In the end, you'll probably have to go through a few rounds of trial and error to establish a baseline for each item that doesn't come with an expiration date. And what if you bought two bunches of bananas on different days? How will you keep track of which is which?

I know I must sound truly lazy, but why can't the app just scan your grocery store receipt, scan barcodes, or use a database of known food expiration dates? If Evernote can scan and search my receipts, I'm sure The Fridge could be set up to do the same thing.

(Perhaps the app's developers, Zanopan, plan to collect user data and build a database of their own.)

But despite the rough edges, this is a slick app with colorful iconography and a clever visual design that looks like the inside of a refrigerator. And as an added bonus, there's a promo video featuring lots of fruit smashing and a watermelon whisperer. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Take a look for yourself:

{{vimeo '102681855'}}

The Fridge costs $1.99 and is only available for the iPhone.


Via: Foodbeast Source: Zanopan Hero image: Flickr user "marktee" (CC BY 2.0)

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