I would like to track my fridge, i.e. food and everyday items or things in the household. At the moment I do this using an Apple shortcut that reads the barcode and an automation that then increases the corresponding helper (counter). Unfortunately I can’t see the expiration date or when it was stored. Perhaps a food entity would be the solution here.
You can use the Todo integration to handle this.
Here’s a screenshot of the options when creating a todo item
I thought about that too, but you don’t get the amount, or rather it gets confusing. If you only buy milk 3 times, for example, then you have 3 individual milks there… ? It’s generally a fairly complex thing that I think a lot of people have struggled with. But I thought maybe more people feel the same way and then you could simplify it.
I don’t really follow what you’re saying. If you bought milk, you just mark it as “done”. If you need to buy milk again, you unmark it as done and put a new due date.
OK… that’s really a misunderstanding. I have an apartment and am mostly away on business. When I’m out shopping, I don’t know what’s still at home or whether I need to buy more toilet paper, for example, because it’s running low. When I go shopping, I simply scan the shopping and automatically have a digital image of my fridge (or other storage rooms). Likewise, when something has been used up, it is scanned and taken out. If, for example, milk is the last bottle in the fridge, milk is automatically added to the shopping list.
So instead of a food entity, you’re really asking for an inventory management system.
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Well, that could be expanded, but I thought it might be easier to have an entity that simply stores the information (quantity, storage date/expiry date, barcode, name, etc.) and then you can do more…?
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How about an add-on like Grocy?
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The grocy suggestion is definitely the best way.
If you are aiming to do this fully in HA, though, you can create a number helper and add labels to it. A label for the expiration date, a label for the date added, etc.
Grocy for my usecase is:
a) graphically just to overwhelming and doesn’t fit well with the rest of any interface (i.e. even I find it hard to use, let alone the rest of the family). And tbh just ‘ugly’ (and yes this matters for larger acceptance of a tool - esp. if you live in a household with others who may not care for barebones looking complex IT solutions that those who love that stuff actually cannot always imagine).
b) Just to extreme in what it can do. Yet very hard to do things like barcode.
scanning. (note: I never found a good barcode scanner for dutch grocery scanning)
I think what would work best is something larger then the current lists in HA, but not as ‘extreme’ as Grocy. Grocy is great and looks like its had a lot of time and effort. But feels very much ‘for IT people only’ (says this IT person). Like how HA itself is making more of an effort to become more usable by ‘normal people’, Grocy for sure is not ‘for normal people’ 
And I say this with the best intentions for both Grocy and those who love using it.