Your pantry and fridge,
finally figured out.

shElf keeps track of the food in your fridge, freezer and cupboards, and tells you what to cook from it before anything goes off. It records what you have, where it is and when it expires, then ranks recipes against four things: what you actually own, what's closest to going bad, what you've already eaten this week, and how long you've got tonight.

It's an inventory app first, and the recipes come out of the inventory. A recipe app shows you every dish and leaves the shopping to you; shElf starts from the food already in your kitchen and only suggests what you can cook right now. Ask for a specific dish and it will tell you what's missing, but the default direction is from your shelf outwards.

A spreadsheet records what you have; shElf keeps that record current and then does something with it. Both give you a list. The difference is everything around the list: the app fills itself in from a photo or a receipt instead of by typing, estimates expiry dates you'd otherwise look up, warns you before something turns, and syncs to everyone in the house. If a spreadsheet is already working for you, keep it — we give away a free pantry inventory template that's better built than most, and it isn't a trial of anything.

Three ways in, and the camera covers three of its own. Tap Camera and choose the mode: one to three photos of the whole shelf, a till receipt, or a barcode. Or use voice — "add milk to my fridge", "I used half the basil" — in your own words, with no wake word, which is the one that works mid-recipe with floury hands. Or type a name and take it from the catalogue, creating a custom item if it isn't there. The camera is the one that changes the maths: a whole shop goes in as a few photos instead of twenty entries. You're not starting from an empty shelf either — the first screen proposes a starter one for your region, so real suggestions appear about a minute in, before you've typed a word.

No — shElf proposes a date when you add something, and you only correct it when you disagree. Where that date comes from depends on the item: anything with a barcode is matched against product databases covering millions of entries, anything without one falls back to USDA food data, and where those disagree or neither is clear a model arbitrates. Its answer then passes an automated check against our own rules before you see it, and the team reviews those outputs on an ongoing basis.

You confirm the list before anything is saved, so a misread never lands in your inventory quietly. On loose, unpackaged food — produce, bread, anything without a wrapper — about nine items in ten come back correct. Packaged goods are harder, and for a specific reason worth knowing: the model reads the label, so a tin photographed edge-on is a tin it can't name. Turn the labels roughly towards the camera and the difference is large.

Yes — a shelf belongs to a household, not to a phone. Invite whoever you live with and you all see the same inventory and the same shopping list, updating live: one of you finishes the milk and everyone's shelf knows. A household is whoever actually shares the kitchen — a couple, a family, flatmates, siblings — and shared shelves sit alongside personal ones, so not everything has to be everyone's.

It keeps working and it suggests worse, and we'd rather say that plainly: shElf is at its best when the shelf reflects the actual kitchen, and that is the real cost of using it. So the honest answer isn't "it doesn't matter" — it's that we've spent most of our effort making the updating cheap. A whole shop goes in as one photo or one receipt, voice handles the small corrections, and when a shelf has drifted there are passive and active nudges to bring it back without a monotonous re-entry session. One storage place kept true beats the whole kitchen kept vaguely.

iOS and Android. It hasn't launched yet — join the waitlist and we'll email you once, when it's available. That's the only launch email you'll get from us.

We haven't announced pricing yet, so the honest answer is that we don't know what to promise you. When we do decide, waitlist members hear first, and nothing will start charging without you choosing it.

We collect what the app needs to work — your email, the food you add, the recipes you save — plus usage and crash data to fix what's broken. Photos you scan and voice you record are deleted the moment they've been read. We don't sell any of it and we don't share it with advertisers, and you can permanently delete your account, and everything in it, from inside the app. The privacy policy spells out each category rather than summarising it.