Grocery Inventory - For 'Shop at Home' Ordering

[personalt]

I saw some old threads a while back that delt with inventoring groceries but they all seemed to die off. I am looking to see if anyone took it any further?

I am looking to get my wife back on board with ordering groceries online. We have a Shoprite 5 minutes away that does shop at home. The problem when I originally tried the service it took me forever to add items to her shopping list. The response was that she could have gone to the store and came back before I added the items to the list. The problme was, As an example, when you searched even for something simple like pepsi you get back 15 items.

I was playing at the shoprite site today and I see now that shoprite supports searching via bar code so it I had a list of barcodes I could be taken to the exact item I want.

I want to build an inventory of what we buy and also what we use/toss so I can re-order as needed.

We what I would like to do is mount a bar code reader in my kitchen to read new items and items as I toss them to help me get an inventory. I could either use two readers(they are cheap enough these days) or a reader by trash for out and by counter to in. RFID would be much cooler but it appears tags on individual food items are still years away.

What would be really cool would be an API with shoprite that I can upload the list of thems for shop at home. I am not suprised they dont have this but to me it seems like a no brainer..


anyone doing anything good with grocery tracking?

 

[electron]

It's one of those things on my to do list (and why I still have a box full of CueCat's). Looking forward to your updated!

 

[AutomatedOutlet]

Yeah, that would be great!

Most of the stores around here though aren't doing online orders anymore though.

 

[stew]

Our store is starting the delivery service up again, hopefully it will last. As far as scanning/inventory, I'd be happy just being able to scan an empty box/bottle/jar that you are getting ready to toss to build a grocery list. The shopping list never seems complete, especially on the things you only buy occasionally.

Mark

 

[mustangcoupe]

If you have a smartphone I have seen a program on xda that you can scan barcodes with a picture from the phone. may be a cool way to do it too... they use it to look things up in google but maybe a tweek and it can save to HA computer

 

[broconne]

If you have a smartphone I have seen a program on xda that you can scan barcodes with a picture from the phone. may be a cool way to do it too... they use it to look things up in google but maybe a tweek and it can save to HA computer

From a where to start perspective.. Is anyone aware of a free or paid database of bar codes that map to products? I guess you could do a manual mapping and after a few months most of your stuff would be in your own DB.

Wonder how hard this would be to do in CQC... At the very least you could make a shopping.. I started making a CQC driver for remember the milk. I had it functioning decently until my trial ran out.. I will pick it back up once I have the house complete and need to buy it.

I bring that up because we keep our shopping list on RTM - I can access it from my iphone, fiance from her blackberry. We just add items to it and then pull it down when we get to the store. Could extend that to support scanning back home and auto add to RTM.. Of course that doesn't take care of your ordering issue.

 

[mustangcoupe]

If you have a smartphone I have seen a program on xda that you can scan barcodes with a picture from the phone. may be a cool way to do it too... they use it to look things up in google but maybe a tweek and it can save to HA computer

From a where to start perspective.. Is anyone aware of a free or paid database of bar codes that map to products? I guess you could do a manual mapping and after a few months most of your stuff would be in your own DB.

Wonder how hard this would be to do in CQC... At the very least you could make a shopping.. I started making a CQC driver for remember the milk. I had it functioning decently until my trial ran out.. I will pick it back up once I have the house complete and need to buy it.

I bring that up because we keep our shopping list on RTM - I can access it from my iphone, fiance from her blackberry. We just add items to it and then pull it down when we get to the store. Could extend that to support scanning back home and auto add to RTM.. Of course that doesn't take care of your ordering issue.

google the UPC code and it brings back product,not a "database" perse but it is a starting point

 

[personalt]

Yes I agree, this is a key feature(scanning empty boxes/cans). When you empty the mustard which you had for 4 months, nice to know it needs replacing.

I think i am going to write something.. I am a CQC guy but I am most comfortable in mysql and okay in php.

It is also possible that there is something off the shelf that could do this and the 'work' will be to wire up the reader near the garbage can.

Other then tracking incoming and outgoing inventory is there any other big features or workflow I should be thinking about? I think I can buy a list of grocery upc codes.

If anyone has other ideas on how they would use this I would love some input while i am in the design phase.

Our store is starting the delivery service up again, hopefully it will last. As far as scanning/inventory, I'd be happy just being able to scan an empty box/bottle/jar that you are getting ready to toss to build a grocery list. The shopping list never seems complete, especially on the things you only buy occasionally.

Mark

 

[hucker]

Here is the site you want for a free UPC code database.

http://www.upcdatabase.com/downloads/

This is a user contributed site like wikipedia that is building the database organically. For grocery like things it is pretty good as best as I can tell. Claims to have a million items. Certainly free is a good price.

There is some C# code that looks to be a kitchen inventory example.

 

[Rustytek]

This is all from memory...... (2 years)

It's been a while since I had it working (my kitchen PC died) but at one point I used a barcode scanner to scan all grocery items coming and going into my house. I just used a script to enter barcode and search googles upc database and build a list of items in my pantry. I think it was TC Recipes that integrated it into homeseer to allow me to search recipes based on the food I had available.

For the shopping list, I switched to shopping list and scanned and added the items to the shopping list script in homeseer. I searched for online grocery stores, but at the time amazon was the only vendor/distributor that would ship items but they sold in bulk.

Anyways, it worked fairly well. It did add a step to unpacking the groceries, which my wife did not like but she loved the recipe integration.

The system would be great if I could order online. To bad we don't have any ShopRite stores in Florida.


Also, I believe the upcdatabase.com at one point listed an API so you could directly integrate it with your program...

 

[ipsgroup]

If you have a smartphone I have seen a program on xda that you can scan barcodes with a picture from the phone. may be a cool way to do it too... they use it to look things up in google but maybe a tweek and it can save to HA computer

From a where to start perspective.. Is anyone aware of a free or paid database of bar codes that map to products? I guess you could do a manual mapping and after a few months most of your stuff would be in your own DB...

Look here for one UPC database: http://www.upcdatabase.com/

It is a free service, is updated regularly (monthly) and users can enter new items to the database. The database currently has over 1,000,000 entries. The website provides a web-based lookup service or you can download the whole database. The data is ASCII text in CSV format. If you have a CueCatâ„¢ you can cut-and-paste the scan output and use it for a lookup. An XML-RPC web service is also offered along with some perl code snippets showing how to retrieve the information (links to Python, Java, C#, PHP and VB.NET code examples are also provided).

I have used it in the past and found the entries to be correct and relatively comprehensive. I did enter a few items for some freeze dried food we have in "storage" and those items were added without any problems.

 

[AutomatedOutlet]

Good find!!!

Here is the site you want for a free UPC code database.

http://www.upcdatabase.com/downloads/

This is a user contributed site like wikipedia that is building the database organically. For grocery like things it is pretty good as best as I can tell. Claims to have a million items. Certainly free is a good price.

There is some C# code that looks to be a kitchen inventory example.

 

[dylanhay]

If you have a smartphone I have seen a program on xda that you can scan barcodes with a picture from the phone. may be a cool way to do it too... they use it to look things up in google but maybe a tweek and it can save to HA computer

do you mean barcode scanner for phone, i find this link: http://www.wikihow.com/Scan-Barcodes-With-an-Android-Phone-Using-Barcode-Scanner it tell us how to scan barcode, do you think it is helpful?
and this tutorial for barcode scanner may be useful as well.