Meals

Pantry

The pantry keeps track of what basics you have at home – toilet paper, washing powder, coffee, cat food – and speaks up on its own when it's time to buy more. You'll find it under the Pantry tab, right after loyalty cards. It's visible to everyone in the household, just like the shopping list.

What it's about

“Is there any washing powder left?” is a question nobody should have to ask any more. Enter your stock once, and patchio keeps an eye on what's running low for you – and even pushes it onto the shopping list automatically when needed.

Keeping track: traffic light or counting

For every item, you choose how precisely you want to know:

Traffic light – in stock, running low, or out. Handy for anything that's hard to count (salt, washing-up liquid): you set the status yourself as soon as you notice it's running down.
Counting – an actual number with a unit, say “6 rolls” or “2 kg”. patchio then works out the status from the stock itself, so you don't switch anything by hand any more. How fine-grained that is depends on the “Warn at” field:
- with a threshold: anything above it is “in stock”, at or below the threshold “running low”, and “out” at 0.
- without a threshold: only “in stock” or – at 0 – “out”. There's no “running low” in that case, because without a threshold, no one knows when little counts as little. If you want the early warning, enter a number under “Warn at”.

Restock rhythm

If you buy an item regularly anyway – coffee every two weeks, cat litter every month – you set up a rhythm for it. Once the item is due, it lands on the shopping list on its own, entirely independent of whether it's currently “in stock” or “running low”. The rhythm is its own schedule, not a replacement for the traffic light – you can use both together, or just one of the two.

Best-before dates

For every item, you can enter a best-before date – one date per item, namely the next one coming up. If you buy a new pack with a different date, just enter the new date.

Three days before, patchio gets in touch once in the app (and by push notification, if that's turned on) – exactly once per date, not every day after that. If you change the date afterwards (because you've bought more, or made a mistake), the reminder resets: patchio gets in touch again for the new date.

You can turn this reminder off in your profile under Notifications (the “Pantry: best-before” topic).

The bridge to the shopping list

If an item from the pantry lands on the shopping list, it carries the “· from the pantry” tag in list view, so it's clear where it came from. Tile view deliberately shows only the icon, name and quantity – you won't see where it came from there.

Tick off an entry like that while shopping, and more happens automatically than just “done”:

The stock tops back up – with the traffic light, the status jumps to “in stock”; with counting (if you've set a target amount), it jumps to that target amount.
The rhythm resets: the next date counts from the day you bought it, not from the originally planned date.

If you delete the entry instead, without ticking it off (because you didn't need it after all), none of that happens – the item only comes back onto the list at the next regular rhythm date, not again the very next day.

Good to know

The pantry doesn't need its own module – like the shopping list, it's available to you from the start.
Unlike the supply in the Health module (which is private, and meant for medication and supplements), the pantry is visible to the whole household and covers everything to do with running the home.