As anyone who has done inventory management could tell you, the admin involved in keeping your pantry inventory up to date would massively outweigh any utility you'd get from this.
Yeah, I wrote a simple pantry manager that used both barcodes on the food items (used an api to lookup and pre-fill basic info) and then small QR codes that I added to the item (to track the individual instance), it was my "pandemic project". It was cool but not the most user friendly (unsurprising, UI/UX are not my strong suits) and it was a little tedious. It was relatively easy to write through and I enjoyed working on it. I was also tracking things like expiration with the intention to have a list of things I should focus on using first.
At the end of the day I abandoned it but the tech stack and the hardware I bought (small Dymo label printer) actually led to me building a side business on top of some of the basic ideas behind it which has grown steadily since.
Maybe it could be worth it for only some items that you always forget to use before they expire. or if it's for saving money by waiting for stuff to get on sale, maybe only for items that are really worth it.
I built this for my chest freezer years ago (including the domain chowcaster.com), which used a barcode scanner to add/remove items. It worked better than a pantry because 1. Less items and typically higher cost, 2. You usually make a trip to your freezer and 3. It's hard to know what's in there. It basically replaced the clipboard my mom still uses to track her freezer inventory.
Same question, but more focus on home electronics. I'd love to track my appliances and home lab setup better than I do today in just a spreadsheet. It'd be nice to get depreciation / warranty tracking, diagrams which show tags/position in the rack for my home lab. Basically similar to enterprise asset management just on a much smaller scale and without needing to operate a full ITIL shop + deploy enterprise scale.
I once, many moons ago, barcode asset tagged all my stuff and was scanning it into an app that could track where it was in your house on a basic 2d wireframe home, which let you report for insurance scheduling purposes. Besides just tracking generally, knowing what stuff you have that is valuable, depreciable, and could be stolen/destroyed is very useful data even for individuals.
I have had some ideas over the years around home electronics (tools and components) management.
I was thinking about building myself a system of QR labelled ziplock bags (inc. antistatic ones) and QR labelled containers.
The main concept of my particular system would be to have a camera covering my workspace, and a camera covering a storage area for containers.
The system would automatically track which QR labelled bags are in which QR labelled container, and also keep a 'last seen' graph of bags that are near other bags, and containers near other containers, so that you don't have to spend too much effort maintaining the system, and when you want a list of things to work with, the system could help you perform a 'computer enhanced rummage' by using your smartphone and have it highlight containers that you want, and ziplocks that contain the things on your list.
Take all those ziplocks out, lay them on your workspace, boom, they are all checked out of the containers by the overhead camera.
Place the containers back on your shelves, boom, the shelve cameras know the positions of the boxes.
When you are done with the items, place a box on your workspace (recognised by camera) and put the packets back in the one box (those packets then checked in to that box).
I don't have a nice workspace to build the system yet, but when I settle into a place I am going to spend more time thinking about it.
Someone mentioned https://inventree.org which looks cool, but there is no distributor API connections AFAIK. I really wanted to ability to scan my Digikey bags and have it auto fill all of the parameters so I made a super basic app to do that. I'm planning on open sourcing it once I clean it up.
It's only really good for groceries, but if you use Paprika's shopping list it will track what you have at home and subtract from it as you complete recipes.