Product · AI
Pantry Lab
AI app to reduce food waste
Brief
A third of all the food we produce ends up in the bin, while groceries keep becoming more expensive. At home, the problem plays out on a smaller scale: you lose track of what is in your cupboard, buy duplicates, and items at the back expire before you use them. The challenge was to address this without creating extra work — because no one uses an app that takes up more time for longer than a week.
Approach
Pantry Lab ties four things together: your inventory, the recipes, your weekly plan and your shopping. You can keep your cupboard up to date in five ways — scan a barcode, photograph a receipt, let the camera recognise your fridge shelf, speak it in, or simply by hand — because that friction decides whether people stick with it. Based on what you actually have in, the AI puts the recipes you can cook right now at the top, from a library of more than 300,000, tuned to your diet and taste and prioritising what's near its expiry date. The meal planner and the smart shopping list follow from there: the list writes itself from your weekly plan and pantry gaps, sorts itself by aisle and connects to the shops you already use. One goal: waste less, without it becoming work.
Pantry Lab is not a client project, but my own venture: as co-founder, I create the product, safeguard the brand and built the automated invoicing flow that takes care of the administration. That combination — product, brand and automation from a single source, with the perspective of someone who runs a business too — is the shortest summary of what Studio 053 does for clients.
Result
- Four connected parts: inventory, AI recipes, meal planner and a smart shopping list
- Update your inventory five ways: barcode, receipt, camera, voice or by hand
- AI matches 300,000+ recipes to what you actually have in, prioritising items near their expiry date
- A shopping list that writes itself, sorts by aisle and connects to the shops you already use
- iOS and Android, free to download
- Recognised by organisations including Microsoft for Startups and AWS