This app will tell you when your food is about to go bad

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published 21 April 2015

You arrive home from work and begin to make that dinner you were mentally preparing all afternoon. You spend thirty minutes chopping vegetables for a beautiful salad, but when you pull the lettuce out of the fridge, the produce bag sags heavily with the weight of that weird green-brown lettuce juice pooled at the bottom.

Surely, many can recall an incident like this, as Americans end up discarding about 25 percent of the food they buy, but a new app called Foodkeeper hopes to significantly reduce that number.

Developed by the USDA, Cornell University, and the Food Science Institute, Foodkeeper serves two main purposes. It will notify you when groceries are about to expire, and it can answer concerns about food mishandling — questions like, "Can I eat this yogurt I forgot to put in the fridge five hours ago?" Granted, you have to manually input information about your groceries (what was purchased and when) in the app for it work, which is an inconvenience, but it could save consumers big bucks in the long run — and spare them from creepy pantry bug infestations.