Fridge Buddy helps you reduce your food waste by alerting you when one of your products is nearing its expiration date.
Fridge Buddy is the second project of my 12 startup challenge. The blog post’s is a bit late, I worked on this project for the whole month of february.
Story behind this project
The idea came when I had to trash some food due to the expiration date passed. I looked on the App Store to find an app that will helps me managing my groceries and avoid trashing my food. I found few apps that does what I want, add products and send notification when the expiration date is near. I tried them, but there were always something that I didn’t like so I decided to make my own version.
For this project I’ve wanted to follow the Apple Human Interface Guideline as much as possible. The second main goal is to be able to add a product quickly with few manual actions.
With these two objectives, I started designing the app on Sketch. It’s difficult for me to keep a sketch file organised, and this project is not an exception.
In order to add a product quickly, I’ve wanted to use the barcode to get all the product metadata. After searching a bit, I found OpenFoodFacts that match all my needs. I decided to try the new framework Combine for all the network layer of the app. Since the network layer is light, currently the app is making only one call to the API, it’s a good stating point for using Combine. Regarding the notifications, they are only local notifications scheduled when you scan a new product, the app does not rely on third party service for the notifications.
I choosed a freemium business model, the core feature of the app is 100% free. You can scan unlimited products and get notifications for them. There are some small features behind the paywall, creating custom lists, change the sorting settings of the list. The in-app purchases are mainly a tip if you liked the app wanted to support and say thanks.
Next steps
Since the app already got some users, I manage to get some feedback and to get an idea of the next features the users wants. I will implement them during the next months when I found a bit of time between the other projects.
