Fridge scanner

Photograph your fridge. Get dinner.

Forky AI reads a photo of the inside of your fridge, turns it into a list of what you actually own, and generates recipes from that list with calories and macros attached. It is the same app that logs the meal afterwards, so the food never has to be entered twice.

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The gap this fills

There are two kinds of app in this space and neither finishes the job. Fridge-scanning apps photograph your shelves and hand you a recipe idea, then stop — no calories, no macros, no log. Calorie counters start one step too late: they want a plate of finished food, and they have no opinion about what you should have cooked in the first place.

The awkward truth is that the decision that matters happens at 18:30 in front of an open fridge, not at 19:45 over a plate. That is the moment where you either cook something that fits your day or order something that doesn't. Forky is built around that moment, and then it keeps the thread: the ingredients you photographed become the recipe, and the recipe becomes the logged meal.

How the scan works

One to three photos

Open the fridge and shoot it. A wide frame covers most shelves; a second frame of the door and a third of the crisper drawer catch what the first one hides. You are not arranging anything — the whole point is that the fridge looks like a real fridge.

Vision returns a structured list, not a paragraph

The photos go through a vision pass that returns machine-readable output: each visible edible item, an estimated quantity, and a freshness read. A structured list is what makes the next steps possible — you cannot compute macros or sort by expiry against a sentence like “looks like you have some vegetables”.

Shelf life gets attached to each item

Every item is given an expected expiry based on what it is and how it is stored. Fresh fish is not the same clock as a jar of mustard. This is an estimate, not a sensor reading, and it exists for one purpose: to sort your recipe suggestions so the things about to go off get cooked first.

Recipes come from the inventory, with macros

Suggestions are generated against what you own, flagging any missing ingredient explicitly. Each one carries calories, protein, carbs and fat per portion, so you can pick against your remaining macro budget for the day rather than guessing.

The meal logs itself

Cook it, confirm the portion, and it lands in your macro day with a per-component breakdown. Tap any component to change its gram weight and the totals recompute — you are never stuck with the model's first guess.

What it is actually good for

The end of the week. Four odd ingredients left and no plan. This is the case the inventory-plus-recipes loop was built for.
Eating what you already bought. Sorting suggestions by expiry is a quiet way to waste less food without turning it into a project.
Cooking to a macro target. Choosing between three dinners is much easier when each one already shows its protein and calories for the portion you will actually serve.
Not typing. The meal you cooked from a Forky recipe is already decomposed into components, so logging it is a confirmation rather than a data-entry session.

How this compares to the alternatives

The fridge-scanning apps — the Pantry Pic / Fridge Vision / FridgeAI cluster — do the recognition step well and end there. If all you want is an idea for dinner and you do not track anything, one of those is lighter than Forky and you should use it.

The calorie counters go the other way. Cal AI photographs a finished plate and estimates it, with no fridge step at all. MyFitnessPal has by far the best packaged-food database in the category, and if most of what you eat has a barcode on it, that database beats any camera. Neither has an opinion about what is in your fridge.

Forky's claim is narrow and checkable: it is the one that carries a single item of food from the shelf, through a recipe, into a logged macro entry. It is not the best barcode scanner, it has a smaller food database, and it is iPhone-only. Those are real costs. The full alternatives list lays them out side by side.

Fridge scanner questions

How many photos of my fridge do I need to take?

One to three. One wide shot of the open fridge covers most of it. A second shot of the door shelves and a third of the crisper drawer catch the things a single frame hides behind other items. More than three adds little, because the limit is what the camera can see, not how many frames it gets.

Does the fridge scanner work on a pantry or a freezer?

Yes for a pantry or a cupboard — the same vision pass runs on any shelf of food. A freezer is harder: frozen items are usually in opaque bags or frosted containers with no visible contents, so recognition drops sharply. Typing those few items in by hand is faster than fighting the camera.

Do I have to re-scan every time I open the fridge?

No. The scan writes into a persistent inventory. After that you correct it as you go — mark an item used, adjust a quantity, add something you bought. Most people do a full re-scan after a grocery run and small corrections in between.

Do the recipes actually only use what I have?

Mostly. Recipe suggestions are generated against your inventory and each one shows which ingredients you already own and which are missing. Forky assumes you have basic staples — salt, pepper, oil, common spices — because a recipe engine that refuses to assume salt produces unusable recipes. Anything beyond staples is listed explicitly as missing.

Does it count calories too, or just suggest recipes?

Both, and that combination is the point. Apps that scan a fridge usually stop at a recipe idea. Calorie counters usually start after the food is already cooked and on a plate. Forky carries the same food through: what's in the fridge, what to cook with it, and the calories and macros of the portion you actually ate, logged against your daily target.

How much does the fridge scanner cost?

The free tier includes a daily AI-scan quota, which covers occasional use without a card. Forky Pro removes the cap at $1.99 per week, $5.99 per month or $39.99 per year, with a 7-day free trial on monthly and yearly.

What happens to my fridge photos?

They are uploaded to process the scan and stored on a self-hosted backend in France, with encrypted offsite backup on Cloudflare R2 served through short-lived signed URLs. They are not sold and not used to train third-party models. Account deletion removes them. The full detail is in the privacy policy.