Ukoni: Keeping Count in my Kitchen

My partner and I love a good shopping haul. There’s something immensely satisfying about going through your day to day knowing that you stocked up on exactly what you need with the right brands and at the right price.

It’s not always an easy thing to accomplish. Across different sections of the house, there’s always a myriad of items that we need and it can be tricky to remember them all on shopping day. We buy different items from different shops and try, when possible, to go shopping in person.

We’ve tried a few different ways to manage maintaining a shopping list and I’ll detail our favourites and what the pitfalls have been:

1. Texting each other items we need as we remember them. Works well when the texts come in right as one of us is going to the shops, otherwise the messages get lost under the mountain of texts we send each other.
2. Notion database. Set up a recipe database template we found on Notion with all the bells and whistles and it was fun to do, but we never went back to it in reality
3. Shared notes. Worked pretty well, although it was a lot of effort to write out the items each time. Wish the notes would remember frequently bought items. Was also interested in seeing more trends, like what items have we stopped buying, how have prices changed over time, etc.
4. Reminders. The iOS reminders app has been probably my favourite way to do this so far because of the auto categorisation feature. It’s not perfect, but you can type in “nappies” and it’ll move it under the “Baby care” heading. Similar issue with notes, repetitive typing,not seeing trends and analytics from it, otherwise it’s pretty perfect.

We also start shopping lists in different ways; sometimes, we make a weekly meal plan and then add the ingredients we don’t have to the list. Other times we take stock of our cleaning cabinet and go from there. My personal favourite is being in bed, craving a midnight snack, realising we are out of biscuits and going from there.

So, as an idea guy™, I thought surely I can make something perfect for our use case? I reckon there’s probably some app out there that already does everything I want perfectly, but I am keen to explore building more and more personal software and exercising my product muscle (Lord knows I’ve barely used it in the last few years).

Meet Ukoni, an inventory management system for the household. There are a few core things it is set out to achieve:

• Keep track of products purchased regularly in the household
• Keep track of stores and prices products are bought from and for
• Keep track of usage of products and stock
• Keep track of plans, like meal plans or cleaning plans and what products are used for those
• Create shopping lists with minimal effort based on information we already have such as stock running low and plans for the week.
• Keep track of the fulfilment of shopping lists and the metadata of the fulfilment such as price, stores and batches.

Amother very important factor is the interface. All that I’ve listed out here was covered by the Notion database template I mentioned above. However, it fell into disuse because keeping it up to date was incredibly tedious. I’m keen to try to build a different, more natural language interface for this system, that should mean I don’t abandon using it after two shopping trips.

Excited to see how it goes!