Hello Pantry

What is in the cupboards, in the chat you already have open.

Open in Telegram Use it in the browser

@hello_pantry_bot · free, no account to create

Hello Pantry is a Telegram bot. There is nothing to install and no account to create: you open a chat, and what you bring home is written down in the same place you were already typing.

Knowing what you have

A pantry is the food in your home, and it is kept in more than one place. You say where: the fridge, the freezer, the left cupboard in the kitchen, the one above the oven. Each thing you put away has a place, an amount and an expiry date, so “do we still have pasta?” has an answer that does not involve opening three doors.

• Several placesFridge, freezer and cupboards are separate places in the same pantry, and you can name as many as you have.
• Packages and amountsThree packages of 500 g of flour are three packages, and 1.5 kg. Both are kept.
• Several pantriesThe flat, the house by the sea, your parents'. Each one has its own places and its own things.

Putting something away

Most of what you buy has a barcode, so most of it does not need typing.

• Scan itIn the Mini App and the web app the camera reads the barcode live.
• Send a photoIn the chat, send a photo of the barcode and the bot reads it for you.
• Or type the digitsWhen the code is worn or the light is bad, the number under it is enough.

The barcode is looked up on Open Food Facts, a free database of food products, and the name, brand, size and picture it finds are shown to you to confirm before anything is saved. A product it does not know you write down once, and the next time it is recognised.

Before it goes off

Every product can warn you before it expires. By default that is two days before, and you can change it for a single product: milk deserves more notice than rice. The warning arrives as a message in the chat, once, on the day it is due.

The freezer

A thing put in the freezer does not expire on the date printed on the box. Hello Pantry keeps the day you froze it and works out an estimated expiry from how long that kind of food keeps frozen. The table of durations is yours to edit, and you can override the estimate for a single package.

Using up part of something

Cooking uses 200 g out of a 500 g package. You say how much, or how many packages, and what is left stays on the shelf with its own expiry. If opening it shortens its life, you can give it a new “use by” date from that day.

The shopping list writes itself

When the last unit of something is used, it goes on the shopping list. You can also give a product a minimum, say two packs of pasta, and it goes on the list as soon as you drop below it. The list is inside Hello Pantry, and you take things off it when you buy them.

Sharing a pantry

A pantry can be shared with the people who live in the house. Everybody has one of three roles:

• OwnerCan do everything, including inviting and removing people, changing their roles and deleting the pantry. There can be more than one, and there is always at least one.
• EditorAdds and uses up things, and creates and renames the places. Cannot invite anybody.
• ViewerSees what is in the pantry, and changes nothing. Useful for whoever only needs to know before going to the shop.

Nobody is added without saying yes. An invitation is a message with two buttons, and the pantry stays invisible to the person invited until they accept.

Only the owner of a pantry needs Pro: the people invited into it do not.

Notifications

When somebody in a shared pantry adds or uses up something, the others are told: one message for each burst, so fifteen things added one after the other are one message and not fifteen. That is on by default, and each person decides for themselves how much of it they want. You can mute a pantry, mute one person, or have the day’s changes arrive together as a digest, once a day, at the hour and in the time zone you choose. Muting is yours only; it does not change what the others receive.

Statistics and export

Statistics show what has been eaten and what has been thrown away, by period, by category, by product and by person, with the trend of the last six months, what expired, and what is still in the pantry past its date. They are in the bot and in the Mini App, and they are part of Pro.

The owners of a Pro pantry can export everything in it, as JSON or as a zip of CSV files. Inside Telegram the file is sent to the chat; in a browser it is a download.

The Mini App

Some days a keyboard beats a conversation. The Mini App opens inside Telegram and shows the same data as the bot: what is in each place, what expires soon, the shopping list, and an add screen built around the camera scan. It is opened from the bot, and Telegram itself vouches for who you are.

The same app also works on its own in a browser, at hello-pantry-app.gpm.name. It is the same account and the same data as in the chat.

What is free, and what Pro is

• FreeOne pantry with one storage place and up to 25 different products. Three packages of milk count as one product. Barcodes, expiry warnings, the shopping list and the Mini App are all included. No sharing.
• ProNo limit on pantries, storage places or products, sharing with owners, editors and viewers, and extras such as consumption and waste statistics and export.

Pro comes two ways, both paid in Telegram Stars: 150 Stars a month, which renews itself and is cancelled from Telegram’s own settings, or 1500 Stars for twelve months, which is a single payment and does not renew — when it runs out you are back on the free plan, having been asked for nothing in the meantime.

Nothing is charged to a card and no payment details ever reach this bot: Stars is the only way Telegram allows digital goods to be paid for, and the bot is told that a payment happened, never how it was made.

When something is broken, or missing

In the information section, in the bot and in the app alike, you can write what does not work, or an idea. What you send goes to apps-management, the service that answers for the apps in this family, with the exact build you were using attached to it.

An email address is optional and nothing above needs it. If you link one, the same address lets you read the replies to your reports, vote on what should be built next, and take your Pro licence with you if you ever change Telegram account. A licence is for one Telegram account at a time: linking the same address to a second account moves it there, it does not give Pro to both.

Your data

What you keep in your pantry lives on one server, in Germany, and is used for nothing except showing it back to you and to the people you shared it with. There are no analytics, no advertising and no third party with a copy. The privacy policy says exactly what is stored and what is not.