About & Credits

Pantry Raider is built on top of a number of excellent open-source projects. If this project has been useful to you, please consider donating to the open-source projects listed below.

Disclaimers

Pantry Raider is a convenience tool for tracking groceries and getting recipe ideas. It is provided as-is, with no warranty, and is not a substitute for professional advice. Use it at your own risk.

  • Food safety: expiry dates, storage suggestions, and "expiring soon" warnings are general guidelines, not guarantees. They do not account for how an item was handled, stored, or whether packaging was opened. Do not rely on this app to decide whether food is safe to eat. When in doubt, throw it out.
  • AI content: AI-generated recipes, cooking suggestions, and barcode identifications can be wrong or entirely made up (hallucinated). Always review ingredients, quantities, cooking times, and internal temperatures yourself before cooking or eating, and confirm anything that affects safety with a trusted source.
  • Allergens and diet: ingredient lists, nutrition figures, and allergen information may be incomplete or incorrect. If you have allergies or dietary restrictions, verify every ingredient independently before consuming.
  • No professional advice: nothing here is medical, nutritional, or food-safety advice. Follow official guidance (for example your local food-safety authority) for anything that matters.
Grocy

Inventory backbone. Grocy handles product storage, stock tracking, and expiry management. Pantry Raider is essentially a better front-end for Grocy.

Mealie

Recipes and meal planning. Mealie stores your recipe library, drives the meal plan week view, and manages shopping lists.

Open Food Facts

Barcode database. Product names, brands, and nutritional data come from Open Food Facts when you scan a barcode.

TheMealDB

Recipe database. Browse and import from TheMealDB's free community recipe collection when adding recipes without Mealie.

Bootstrap

UI framework. The responsive layout, dark theme, and all component styling come from Bootstrap 5 and Bootstrap Icons.

FastAPI

Web framework. All API routes, background tasks, and the Jinja2 template rendering run on FastAPI.

Pillow

Image processing. Photo analysis and barcode camera capture rely on Pillow for image resizing and format conversion before sending to the vision model.

Home Assistant

Automation integration. REST sensors, barcode scanner automations, and the Lovelace inventory dashboard all tie into Home Assistant.

python-barcode / ZBar

Barcode decoding. Camera-based barcode scanning uses ZBar (via a browser library) to decode product codes from photos.

python-elgato-streamdeck

Stream Deck driver. The hardware controller uses the open-source python-elgato-streamdeck library for USB communication and key image rendering.

Support the projects that make this possible

Pantry Raider is built on the shoulders of excellent open-source projects. If Pantry Raider has saved you money on food waste or made cooking easier, please consider giving back to the projects that make it possible.

These are all volunteer-run, community-supported projects. Even a small donation or a GitHub star goes a long way.


Pantry Raider itself is free for home use. If it has earned a spot on your counter, you can buy the developer a coffee.

Support the project

An honest note about how AI tools were used to build Pantry Raider.

How AI was used

Large language models were used as a tool during development, the same way a developer uses an editor, a search engine, or a linter. They helped draft code, suggest fixes, and speed up routine work.

The end program is mainly the result of real human work. Design decisions, architecture, and the choices about what to build and how it should behave were made by a person. The code was reviewed, edited, and validated with thorough testing on real hardware (Raspberry Pi appliances, real scanners, and live Grocy and Mealie instances), not just generated and shipped.

A note on security

Use caution when installing software on your network, and review what you run before you run it. That is good practice for any project, with or without AI involvement. Pantry Raider is open source, so you can read the code, check the dependencies, and decide for yourself.

If you find a problem or have a question about how something works, the source is on GitHub.