Pantry inventory with a barcode scanner: what scanning is good for
A barcode scanner is the feature everybody searches for and the one that matters least once the list exists. It is genuinely useful for putting a shop away — point, name appears, done. It is useless for most of what is actually in a chest freezer, and it is worth knowing which half of your kitchen it helps with before you pick anything.
What scanning is good at
Adding things with a printed label, in a run. A big shop coming home is the one moment when typing is genuinely annoying: a dozen tins, each with a name you have to spell. Pointing a camera at each barcode and getting the name filled in turns that into a few seconds per item. It also means a tin you re-scan next month matches the row you already have instead of making a second one.
What scanning is useless at
Everything in a freezer bag. A portion of mince you froze flat in a bag, a tub of stock, berries you picked, half a loaf, a bolognese from Sunday — none of it has a barcode, and that is most of the volume in a chest freezer. The honest conclusion is that a barcode scanner is a convenience for the cupboard and irrelevant to the freezer, so it should never be the thing you choose an inventory on.
Where the names come from
The useful scanners read the number off the barcode and then look the product up in a public database. tincount uses Open Food Facts, which is open data maintained by volunteers. The lookup goes straight from your own browser to them, which has two consequences worth knowing: the barcode never passes through us, so we cannot keep it; and their published budget of 15 lookups per minute per address is yours alone rather than shared with every other visitor.
The limits, said out loud
A public database does not know every product in every country, so some numbers come back with nothing — especially supermarket own brands. When that happens the number is kept and you type the name yourself, and a later scan of the same tin finds your row. The names it does return are the database's, not yours: it will call a tin of beans something long and French, and you will want to shorten it to "beans". And on an iPhone there is no camera scanning at all, because Safari has no barcode support; typing the number works, and typing the word is usually faster anyway.
What to do instead, if scanning is the main thing you wanted
Count the cupboard once by hand and use the scanner only when a shop comes in. Ten minutes of typing at the start buys you a list you can then maintain with single taps, and the taps are the part that decides whether you still have a working list in March.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free pantry inventory app with a barcode scanner?
tincount scans barcodes in browsers that support it and is free, with no account and no cap on how much you can add. The lookups run from your own browser against Open Food Facts, so they cost nothing to run and nothing to use.
Why does the scanner not work on my iPhone?
Safari does not have the browser barcode support the camera scanning needs. The number field works everywhere, and for freezer contents there is usually no barcode to scan in the first place.
What happens if the barcode is not in the database?
You type the name and the number is kept against that row, so scanning the same tin later finds it instead of adding a duplicate. You can also add the product to Open Food Facts yourself, which helps the next person.