I’ve tried using Grocy because I wanted to experiment with managing my family’s pantry stock, including tracking product prices and expiration dates. I think it’s a great idea, but I’ve hit a major roadblock: when I scan products after shopping, the system often can’t find them.
That’s why I’m writing here—I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong or if not all products are included in the database. I live in Argentina, so I also wondered if products from outside the U.S. or Europe might not be in the system, which happens sometimes.
If anyone has any tips or advice to help me make better use of this super interesting app, I’d really appreciate it.
For now, I’m using it as an add-on within Home Assistant. I hope I’ve assigned the correct category to this message.
I think there must be some kind of centralized database with all the products, because it wouldn’t make sense for a small shop owner starting a business to have to create their own database from scratch. That kind of thing has to exist.
Now, it’s probably some kind of commercial solution, because if it weren’t, it would already be included by default in Grocy. But hey, this is just me speculating—I honestly have no idea.
There are multiple centralised databases. for example https://go-upc.com/
A lot of them have API’s - that one I linked included but they all seem expensive.
there’s ShopSavvy - Data API who have a free teir but only allow 20 credits/month (one credit = one product request)
or openfoodfacts - replace the number before .json with the barcode number to look up a barcode. the link below is for heinz beans.
Thanks for the replies. I did a bit more digging and it seems like we’re all facing the same issue: finding a database that’s complete enough to let us load our products. The options out there are either paid or very incomplete.
I don’t usually criticize open-source projects because I understand that, above all, they’re acts of enthusiasm and generosity. But unfortunately, without this issue being somewhat resolved, there’s not much we can do. Spending the time to manually enter dozens of products and different configurations after a grocery run is just not realistic.