Keeping an Inventory of Your Food & Equipment Prep Items - Solutions?

[Tigger]

Posted by Journeyman (here)

Posted by Tigger (here)

Can anyone suggest a reliable system that they use to keep track of stock in this manner? Remember, I’d prefer a ‘stand-alone’ system that can operate offline if necessary.

I would approach the problem from the same direction as happyuk and look to use a spreadsheet, either Excel or one of the excellent free alternatives. There's templates that you can use to drastically reduce the setup time such as those listed here: https://www.smartsheet.com/content/f...tory-templates

That said, the apps suggested by Michi could be a better fit, particularly if barcode reading is integrated. My reservation there is precisely the point you make in your last para. A spreadsheet can sit on your own computer and be run completely independently of any network. Whereas some of these apps may require you to be online to function or decide down the line to require a subscription to allow you to continue to access them. I think the spreadsheet way may require more tinkering to get started and may not have as nice an interface, but once up and running, it could be the most secure and cost effective way to manage your affairs?

Yes indeed. It will invariably be a fusion between ‘ease of use’ versus a degree of offline integrity. However, Michi has given me an idea:

Cyclone Jasper (Dec 2023) was a classic case-in-point. It took out power lines. It took out roads. Satellite internet was flaky at best. Meaning there was no supply of standard food and grocery items for weeks. Initially that didn’t worry me too much, as I had (or thought I had) adequate supplies of general items to keep me going. But since I didn’t have a detailed ledger of exactly what items I had stored, nor an accurate measure of precisely which consumables I routinely consumed over time, I fell short of specific items.

So, a software solution would probably be a more anttractive idea, in the assumption that it could also aid in tracking the volume of goods-in versus goods-out over time. That could provide a useful indicator of what items I consume with respect to others, and hence help me to adjust inventory levels for future scenarios. The caveat, of course is that in the absence of Internet, the software should be able to work indefinitely in an ‘offline’ mode.

I will continue to do some research…

[Tigger]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I have a related question about frozen food. How long does frozen produce last?? I actually don't really know for sure.

(And @Tigger, my apologies again if my mousetrap post was frivolous and off-topic. But mice really are a problem for me here, and I have to seriously factor that into my own inventory management.)

Actually this was not frivolous at all. Vermin are a very important consideration. I don’t have a problem with mice where I live, but I DEFINITELY have a problem with pantry moths. So I’m glad you brought this up. Let me rant on about this, because I don’t want people to lose $$ of stock due to vermin:

For those of you who are not aware, pantry moths are those little blue-grey moths that appear in your kitchen stores every now and then. As far as I am aware, they often infest foods at the factory processing plants. They lay their eggs in bulk storage, often infecting rice, flour, wheat, bread mixes, pasta and other similar foodstuffs. When the factory packages them, the eggs are packaged along with the product. “HACCP” standards are often forsaken for reduced costs - they know authorities can’t audit every factory and the factories take advantage of it.

On the supermarket shelves, you’ll pick out (say) a bag of rice and, dutifully reading the “use-by” date, will consciously store the product in your larder. The eggs hatch, releasing the ‘grubs’, which eat the carbohydrates in the foodstuff. They eventually pupate into those moths. They can eat through plastic packaging (I’m at a loss to explain how they do this), and then move on to infest other areas of your larder.

Be very, very wary of these moths. They can destroy entire stores if left unchecked. A fact I learned the hard way! Here’s how I’ve learned to control / eradicate them:

First and foremost, install pantry moth traps. You can usually find these at any suitably large department store.

Second, re-package any food that is grain-based. I use Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. Whenever I purchase grain-based foods (including pasta!), I’ll remove the original packaging and re-pack those foodstuffs into Mylar bags, along with an oxygen-absorber and moisture absorber. I then heat-seal those bags and store them in my food pantry as normal.

Removing the oxygen from the environment breaks the life-cycle of these moths. It also dramatically increases the shelf-life of the food; typically way beyond the gazetted’ ‘use-by’ date.

I know this sounds like a lot of effort, but trust me on this one. It’s worth it.

To offer some insight to your extremely important question - How long do frozen foods last? It ultimately depends on the minimal temperature of your freezer, and to a lesser degree the ambient surrounding temperature. Most people’s freezers will maintain a temperature of minus 18C (-0.4F), which is okay for short-term storage. In my experience, it all comes down to microbiology. Meaning, it entirely depends upon the freezing temperature and the typical microbiomes characteristic of certain foods. Some microbes can continue to grow at 0.4F and spoil food within 3 months. But if the temperature was -40C/-40F, spoilage times increase.

It has been a very long time since I brought my biotechnology degree to the industry, so I am very rusty on most of the scientific info I learned in lectures. I do recall a very important book in my curriculum, “Foodborne Microorganisms of Public Health Significance”. It is worth reading:

https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/861133

All I can tell you is, do not expect your domestic fridge/freezer to store frozen foods for an extended period. If you can, invest in a -40C (-40F) chest freezer for bulk frozen food storage.

Getting back you your initial point about controlling pests and vermin, I can say (from previous experience) that, unless you take steps to mitigate these issues, you may lose a significant quantity of stores to spoilage / infestation.

[Bill Ryan]

A major piece of learning here (for me!) which I felt it might be useful to share.

(Maybe this is nothing new for anyone else reading this. But for me, it was quite important. And I truly can't believe I was so dumb. )

In my store of longlife foodstuffs — enough to last for maybe a year — I also have a store of vitamins and other supplements.

I'd gradually collected them, taking advantage of BOGO (Buy-One-Get-One-Free) offers, special discounts, sale items, and the like. One of the issues I have is that I need to order most things from the US, which takes time to get here via quite a complicated personal supply chain, and which is not always 100% reliable.

So I've always felt I should keep a good stock in hand. And if the SHTF, then I'd have enough supplements to last a year or more as well — much longer if I economized.

In my recent post on the Vitamin D thread I shared how I was mystified when a routine blood test — my first for a couple of years — showed that I was Vitamin D deficient.

That baffled me, as I'd been taking a 5000 IU capsule every other day for almost ever. So when I got the test result, I increased my daily Vitamin D3 supplement — from a different bottle that I'd had for quite a long time — to 10000 IU every day. That's 4x as much.

After a couple weeks, I had another blood test. My Vitamin D levels were lower still.

Eventually it dawned on this bear of very little brain that the D3 capsules I'd been taking (the 5000 IU bottle AND the 10000 IU bottle) were both out of date.

There was almost nothing in them any more of any value. I was just faithfully taking gel capsules that might as well have been empty.

It never occurred to me, not even once, that vitamins and other supplements could lose their potency over time — way down to almost zero. Ten minutes on the net searching for all this confirmed that yes, this can easily happen.

• So now I need to establish my own inventory of vitamins and supplements that carefully dates and tracks each item.
• And, from now on I'll label the bottles with the date they were bought.
• And, I clearly can't treat supplements like tins of tuna or bags of pasta and assume that they're probably good for years on end.

Ones I've had on the shelf for quite a while may be useless — and I'd never know.