A food expiry app that reduces real household waste.

Best-before is a quality guideline; use-by is a safety boundary. Foods past best-before are usually fine, foods past use-by should not be eaten. An app that mixes the two trains people to ignore both — keep them separate.

• Best-before: quality marker, often fine a day or two past
• Use-by: safety boundary, treat as strict
• After opening: per-product 'within X days' overrides the date

Expiry dates appear in roughly the same spot on most packaging. Kigen reads the date from a single photo. Product names can be a tap-in, or just the category — 'condiment', 'frozen', 'pantry' — for searchability.

When someone else in the household sees what's already in stock, double-purchases naturally decrease.

Aiming for perfection is exactly how food tracking fails. Five minutes on a weekend, opening the fridge and reordering 'use this week' items, is enough to make real waste drop. Kigen surfaces what's nearest expiry automatically.

Canned goods, dried goods, retort foods, condiments. These have long shelf lives and become the worst forgetters — items from years ago surface at moves. A dedicated pantry list and a once or twice yearly walk-through reminder unearths the slow-moving stock.

Disaster preparedness stockpiles are bought once and rarely revisited until an actual emergency — and that's exactly when expiry surprises hurt most. Putting the stockpile on a list with one-month-before reminders supports natural rolling-stock use.