Remember our article about food date labelling? The one that speaks about the misleading nature of “Best Before”, “Use By”, “Sell By” and other expiry stickers. How they could persuade you into tossing the product as soon as the magic date passes.
If you want to dig into this subject, we can suggest a report, published by NRDC: “The Dating Game: How a confusing food date labelling system in the United States leads to food waste”. You will find that labels don’t actually indicate the safety of food (or even tell you when it will spoil). With this in mind, we enhanced CozZo to track and report on products with respect to how they actually lose their qualities.
“Best By (Within)” and “Use By (Within)” date tracking.
We added a simple and straightforward distinction between highly perishable foods and all other products that lose their quality over time but are still safe to eat/use. “Best By” ones will lose some of the taste, flavour or texture but with a bit of creative cooking, you can rescue them from the bin.
CozZo suggests a setting, looking at the category of the product. For example, all “Meat, Fish” products are defaulted to “Use Within(By)” and you can change the suggested value to match your preference.
Reporting on product status considers this setting and uses dark GREEN (Best By) and dark RED (Use By) for icons and DUE TIME infobar (refer to pics).
Double add prevention and auto finish.
Putting a product twice on your shopping list is something that we can now help you to avoid. In this case, we will present an option for an update with the newly selected quantity or you can do the add if this is the desired action.
When you move a product (from Add or To Buy) to your home inventory, we detect if it is already present and allow you to finish the old one or do a quick update on it. Action choices are shown and we lead you to complete the task with the minimum effort.
New units and dictionary improvements.
“Bunch” and “tub” quantity types were added to relevant categories, like “Fruits, Vegetables”.
English and Bulgarian product dictionaries, used for our autosuggest feature were topped up with 500 new names.
Design updates.
You will notice a few new icons when moving a product from Favs, Reuse, At Home and To Buy. With them, we’re starting a gradual refresh of our design to match the 2018 trends 🙂
Special thanks to Michael Holden from STOPFoodWaste.ie for helping out with ideas and feedback. Please pay a visit to our Facebook page, we’re sharing every day informative (and sometimes fun) info about anti-food waste initiatives and innovations around the world.
CozZo 1.5 is available on USA, UK, Ireland and Bulgaria App Stores for iPhone 5 and newer.
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