Food Tracking Spreadsheet
I thought it might be useful to put up a copy of our Food Inventory Spreadsheet.
The first worksheet is the most important; it's designed to be very easy to add new items and to sort by date or type. The 'Eat By' field is formatted so that past dates turn red for easy visibility of old food; it will be orange on the day the food goes old, and black before that. The color formatting wasn't advanced enough for me to have it turn orange a week or two away as I'd really have liked it to. The Type field is also formatted to color code the food types so they can be spotted more easily. I've been using Still Tasty as a reference for how long food is at its best in the freezer. (It will be safe indefinitely when frozen, but the quality is best before those times, and many foods will not be tasty if it gets too old, safe or no.)
There's no reason why pantry items and fridge items couldn't also be tracked here, but we found that the freezer tended to be the most "out of sight, out of mind" especially since we have a chest freezer. The sorting system in the chest freezer is very simple: we have some of those sturdy recycled plastic shopping bags, which we just label on the handles with masking tape. It's very easy to pull a shopping bag out of the freezer and look through it without leaving the whole freezer open. We try to keep things of the same type in the same bags with each other.
The fruit worksheet is unique to our situation, where we are trying to eat locally grown foods throughout the year. So last summer, we froze a bunch of fruit. We didn't really try to figure out how much we needed, we just froze what looked good at the time. We started eating the fruit in January and are pacing it so it will last through April -- not as our entire fruit supply, but definitely a change from the more limited winter selections. I'll also try to keep notes on which months are particularly low on fruit, since January this year hasn't been so bad: pears, citrus, apples, and kiwifruit! In mid to late April the first strawberries should be coming in. So far the blueberries are the winners and the strawberries are the runner ups; the ollallieberries just change too much in freezing.
We no longer use the meal worksheet, but it's what we were using for a while. Feel free to poke through it for the raw data of how we planned meals early last year. From there we went to a more detailed process on Evernote, and then we actually figured out a way to do it without having to list the plan: we discuss the plan on the morning of the shopping day, and then lay out everything into colanders in the fridge sorted by which dish they're going into. This is oriented around batch cooking so certainly not for everyone, but might be a useful template for daily cooks as well.
Feel free to make a copy for your own use; that's why it's up there. It's been very helpful for us, because we had a tendency to overlook frozen food before, and it makes it easier to buy food in bulk when it's on sale because we know we'll use it.
The first worksheet is the most important; it's designed to be very easy to add new items and to sort by date or type. The 'Eat By' field is formatted so that past dates turn red for easy visibility of old food; it will be orange on the day the food goes old, and black before that. The color formatting wasn't advanced enough for me to have it turn orange a week or two away as I'd really have liked it to. The Type field is also formatted to color code the food types so they can be spotted more easily. I've been using Still Tasty as a reference for how long food is at its best in the freezer. (It will be safe indefinitely when frozen, but the quality is best before those times, and many foods will not be tasty if it gets too old, safe or no.)
There's no reason why pantry items and fridge items couldn't also be tracked here, but we found that the freezer tended to be the most "out of sight, out of mind" especially since we have a chest freezer. The sorting system in the chest freezer is very simple: we have some of those sturdy recycled plastic shopping bags, which we just label on the handles with masking tape. It's very easy to pull a shopping bag out of the freezer and look through it without leaving the whole freezer open. We try to keep things of the same type in the same bags with each other.
The fruit worksheet is unique to our situation, where we are trying to eat locally grown foods throughout the year. So last summer, we froze a bunch of fruit. We didn't really try to figure out how much we needed, we just froze what looked good at the time. We started eating the fruit in January and are pacing it so it will last through April -- not as our entire fruit supply, but definitely a change from the more limited winter selections. I'll also try to keep notes on which months are particularly low on fruit, since January this year hasn't been so bad: pears, citrus, apples, and kiwifruit! In mid to late April the first strawberries should be coming in. So far the blueberries are the winners and the strawberries are the runner ups; the ollallieberries just change too much in freezing.
We no longer use the meal worksheet, but it's what we were using for a while. Feel free to poke through it for the raw data of how we planned meals early last year. From there we went to a more detailed process on Evernote, and then we actually figured out a way to do it without having to list the plan: we discuss the plan on the morning of the shopping day, and then lay out everything into colanders in the fridge sorted by which dish they're going into. This is oriented around batch cooking so certainly not for everyone, but might be a useful template for daily cooks as well.
Feel free to make a copy for your own use; that's why it's up there. It's been very helpful for us, because we had a tendency to overlook frozen food before, and it makes it easier to buy food in bulk when it's on sale because we know we'll use it.