# Pantry & scans

> Keep the fridge and shelves current so the plan cooks around them.

Your pantry is the household's on-hand inventory — what's in the fridge, freezer, and cupboards right now. Keep it current and the week's plan reads it, leaning toward dishes that use what you already have before food turns.

![Pantry shelves grouped by section with a soonest-to-expire item on top.](https://forkboard.app/docs/pantry-shelves.svg)

*What's on hand, soonest-to-expire first.*

## How the pantry is organized

Items group onto six shelves — Produce, Protein, Dairy & eggs, Pantry, Freezer, and Other — and the shelf is guessed from the name, so you rarely set it yourself. Eggs land under dairy. Within each shelf the soonest-to-expire item sits on top, so the things to cook first are always at eye level.

Expiry shows as a small pill: today, a few days out, a calendar date when it's further off, or how long ago something lapsed. Expired items are never deleted for you — they stay flagged so you decide whether to keep, eat, or remove them.

## Add an item by hand

Manual entry works the same on the web board and in the iPhone app.

1. Open Pantry — the Pantry page on web, the Pantry tab on the phone.
2. In the add row at the top, start typing an ingredient. A type-ahead of known ingredients appears so 'tomato' and 'tomatoes' don't fork into two items — pick a suggestion or type your own.
3. Optionally set a quantity, pick a unit (lb, oz, g, cup, can, each, and so on), and an 'expires on' date.
4. Tap Add. The item lands on the right shelf on its own.

> Note: Names and units are tidied on save — 'garlic cloves' becomes garlic with a 'clove' unit — so the pantry lines up cleanly with your recipes and grocery list.

## Edit or remove

Find the item on its shelf. On web, Edit lets you change the quantity, unit, or expiry and Save; Remove deletes it. On the phone, tap the row to edit or use its remove control. Changes save right away and the list re-sorts by expiry. You can edit quantity, unit, and expiry but not the name — to rename, remove the item and add the correct one.

## How the pantry shapes the plan

When you generate or regenerate a week on the Board, the planner reads up to 40 pantry items and biases toward using them — prioritizing anything within three days of expiry so it lands on a plate before it's lost. The pantry is a hint, not a hard rule: the week won't cook only from your shelves, it just leans on them where it can.

Adding items by hand keeps the web and phone in step. Filling the pantry faster — photographing a shelf or scanning barcodes — lives in the iPhone app, covered next.

Related: [Scanning your shelves](https://forkboard.app/docs/scanning-your-pantry.md) · [Building your grocery list](https://forkboard.app/docs/grocery-list.md)

Canonical page: https://forkboard.app/docs/pantry-and-scans