The date is not the problem, the timing is
Almost nobody throws food away because they did not know it had a date on it. They throw it away because they found out on the wrong day.
There are exactly two useful moments to learn that something expires on Friday. One is Monday, when there is still time to build a meal around it. The other is in the store, when you are about to buy a second one. Reading the packet on Saturday, holding it over the trash, is not a moment at which any information is useful.
An expiration date tracker is less a filing system than a way of moving that information from Saturday to Monday.
Recording dates without it becoming a chore
The only moment worth doing this is when you put the shopping away. Everything passes through your hands exactly once, the packets are in front of you, and it costs a few seconds per product. Any other time and you are doing a separate task, which is the kind of task that survives about ten days.
Scan the barcode, add the date if the date matters, put it on the shelf. If a product has no meaningful date, skip the field entirely rather than inventing one, a tracker full of fictional dates is worse than an empty one, because you learn to ignore it.
Per-product delays, not one global rule
This is the setting that decides whether reminders stay useful or become noise.
Yogurt with three days left needs a different warning from a jar of pesto with three months. If both fire five days ahead, half your notifications are about things you were never going to forget, and within a month you are dismissing all of them without reading. The delay belongs to the product, not to the app.
What it looks like when it works
You open the app and the things closest to their date are at the top. Not a calendar, not a spreadsheet, a short list of what to cook from this week.
The reminder arrives on the day you asked for, once. If you are in the store you can check what is already at home before buying a replacement for something with four days left on it.
And when a date genuinely does not matter, there is no date, no reminder and no guilt about it.
