Use what you have before it goes
Household waste is rarely dramatic. It is a second jar of the thing you already had, and a bag of spinach nobody remembered buying.
Bananatoday
Spinachtoday
Mushroom1 day
Broccoli2 daysWaste is a visibility problem first
Food does not usually go off because a household stopped caring. It goes off because nobody could see it at the moment they were deciding what to cook. The ingredient was home the whole time and lost the argument to whatever was in the front of the fridge.
A shared record stops the duplicate shop
When both people in a household can see the same pantry, the second jar does not get bought. That is a smaller promise than most waste apps make, and it is the one that holds up on a Tuesday.
Cooking is what actually clears the shelf
Knowing something is about to turn is only useful if it leads somewhere. Heilsa connects the pantry to recipe coverage, so what is home shapes what gets suggested, and the ingredient gets used instead of noticed.
Freshness you never have to type in
Heilsa does not ask you to enter use-by dates. Data a household has to hand-enter for every item is data that stops being entered by the second week, and a half-maintained expiry list is worse than none. Instead it works out roughly how long a thing keeps from what it is and when it arrived, so the pantry can show you what is close to its end without anyone maintaining it.
In the app
How Heilsa does it.
Meal planning
Dinner plans that start from the fridge
Plan up to a fortnight of dinners. Heilsa ranks the choices by what needs using and what you already have, and leaves the deciding to you.
Meal planning in detail
Shopping list
A shopping list that writes itself
Plan a dinner and what it needs, minus what is already home, goes on the shared list. Tick it in the shop and it is in the pantry.
Shopping list in detail
Recipes
Recipes, checked against your kitchen
A hundred curated recipes and every one you add, each marked Can make now, Almost there or Missing key from what is at home.
Recipes in detail
Questions
Plain answers.
- Does Heilsa track expiry dates?
- Not by hand. Asking a household to enter a date for every item is the kind of upkeep that gets abandoned quickly, and stale dates give worse guidance than no dates.
- Will it tell me what to use first?
- Yes. Every food on the pantry wall carries a rough time left — “2 days”, “today”, “past best” — estimated from USDA FoodKeeper figures for what it is and where it is kept, never from anything you enter. Whatever has three days or fewer sits on a Use soon shelf at the top, and dinners that use it come first when you are choosing a meal.
Where else it helps
- What is for dinnerHeilsa answers what is for dinner from your household pantry: what you can cook now, what is nearly covered, and what is missing.
- Shared shopping listA shared grocery list that knows why each item is on it, and puts what you buy back into the pantry when you get home.
- Pantry inventoryA shared pantry for households that pays for its own maintenance by driving dinner decisions and the shopping list.
- Cook what you haveHeilsa checks recipes against your household pantry, so you see what you can cook now and what is a couple of items away.
Try it with your own kitchen
Heilsa comes to the App Store in November. Join now, through TestFlight, and your household keeps it free through 2027.
iPhone with iOS 15.1 or later, in the UK and Switzerland. Somewhere else?