The app
Cellarium
The larder ledger.
Everyone has found the same jar twice at the back of the cupboard, and thrown out yoghurt they forgot they owned. Cellarium is a calm, offline ledger for everything you keep at home, so you always know what's in, what's low, and what needs eating first. Log food across the pantry, fridge, freezer and any locations you add, with a quantity, a unit and a best-before date. No scanning, no account.
- Pantry
- Fridge
- Freezer
At a glance
A shelf you can read in one look
The home screen puts an "expiring soon" strip at the top, a "running low" strip under it, and quick totals for every location. Each item wears a freshness ring that travels from green through amber to red as its date approaches, so a slow scan tells you what to cook tonight.
- Tap an item"Use one" or "used up", with its history behind it
- Running lowAnything under the threshold you set yourself
- Use soonA view for cooking down what's on the edge
- Shopping listFill it from low and expiring items, tick as you shop, restock in one move
Marking things used or binned feeds a small stats page that shows, over weeks, how much you actually eat against how much you throw away. Set your own "expiring soon" window, choose date formats and units, pick a shelf or linen backdrop, and keep the lot on the device with no cloud and no ads.
Get Cellarium on Google PlayPackage com.larderloom.cellarium
Dates, and which ones matter. In the UK a use by date is about safety and a best before date is about quality, and they are not interchangeable: food can be unsafe on its use-by date even if it looks and smells fine. Cellarium keeps the dates you type; it cannot judge whether anything is safe to eat, and neither can a colour ring. Follow storage instructions, keep the fridge at 5 °C or below, never taste something to test it, and when in doubt throw it out. Food Standards Agency guidance is the authority here, not this app.
Working out
Eat the nearest date first, and the maths agrees
Say eight things in the fridge each need a certain number of portions to finish, each has a date, and you can eat two portions a day. Which do you cook first? This is a scheduling problem that was solved in 1968: order jobs by deadline, and drop the longest job whenever you fall behind. Moore and Hodgson proved it wastes the fewest items possible. Watch three kitchens run the same fridge.
Three kitchens, one fridge
Each tin shows the days left on its date. Green becomes amber becomes red as its date closes in; eaten tins rise and vanish, binned tins fall away.
Nearest date first 0 saved · 0 binned
No system, just grabbing 0 saved · 0 binned
Newest and nicest first 0 saved · 0 binned
Press play and the same eight items are eaten in three different orders.
What's not here: no ledger, no locations, no shopping list and no dates of yours. The model treats a fridge as a scheduling problem with fixed portions and a fixed appetite, which no real week respects, and it says nothing about whether anything is still good. The app keeps the actual shelf.
On paper
VelvetOak Digital
- Company
- SECURE INVESTMENT SOLUTIONS LTD, trading as VelvetOak Digital
- Director
- Haseeb Aslam
- Registered office
- c/o Isaacs, St James Business Park, Trust House, 5 New Augustus Street, Bradford BD1 5LL, United Kingdom
Found a unit the app converts oddly, or a freshness ring that turns red a day early? Tell us the item and the dates. Those are quick fixes and they matter more than features.