What do you mean we don't have any more sweet potatoes?!?!

November 2, 2016 9:25 AM

Baby Kitty is rocking the solid food, and Mr. Kitty and I prefer to make it ourselves. We have little ball 4oz storage jars that we keep in our chest freezer and defrost for meals, but we lose track of how many we have of each food type and will run out of favorites. Is there a good recommended app that will log when a solid food was created, used, and provide alerts when certain categories (ie pears & sweet potatoes) drop below a pre-determined minimum.
posted by Suffocating Kitty to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Does it have to be an app? This seems like the sort of thing that a whiteboard on the freezer would be useful for keeping track of - just start out with a count of how many you have, and update it every time you take jars out.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:02 AM on November 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

I use a sheet of paper for this with circles for each serving. Cross out a circle every time you use one. It's pretty easy to see when I'm running low.
posted by sockermom at 10:05 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

If both of you feed the kitten and you want an electronic solution, how 'bout a shared Google Doc spreadsheet you can both update?
posted by carmicha at 11:29 AM on November 2, 2016

This one looks like it would do the trick. Looking for "food inventory app" brought up a lot of options, so maybe that's a good place to start. It looks like a lot of them are recipe/shopping focused, but if you can use the inventory part of the app without getting into the other parts, they should work okay for this purpose. (Putting sockermom's suggestion on a whiteboard seems like a good solution, though. Kids are in the "separate food from parents" stage for a relatively short amount of time.)
posted by LKWorking at 12:05 PM on November 2, 2016

Do you have room for individual bins for each food so you can tell at a glance what's running out?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:31 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not an app, sorry--but I saw this method of just writing your inventory directly on to your chest freezer with dry-erase markers linked from Buzzfeed and am going to try it with our regular fridge this weekend.
posted by stellaluna at 1:25 PM on November 2, 2016

I think is going to be easiest to track using a clipboard. When you create the servings, put the type and date on the container with tape and a sharpie.
posted by Foam Pants at 5:29 PM on November 2, 2016

We have several sheets of paper on the top of our freezer to track its contents, and a whiteboard for reminders of what needs to be bought/prepared/refilled until the next shopping list is written.

Are you thinking software so you can refer to it when you are out of the house, or for the proactive reminders? It seems like overkill to me. (But we have four kids, and I totally understand the desire to take the human out of the loop whenever possible!)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:16 AM on November 3, 2016