Comparison

ShelfLife vs SuperCook — Grocery Tracking vs Ingredient Recipes

SuperCook is a genuinely good recipe finder — point it at some ingredients and it finds something to cook. ShelfLife is a different tool: it tracks what you actually bought, tells you when it expires, and pushes you to cook the right thing first. Here's where each one wins.

The core difference in one sentence

SuperCook answers "what can I make with these ingredients?" ShelfLife answers "what expires when — and what should I cook tonight?" One is a recipe search engine. The other is a food tracker with recipe matching built in. They overlap on recipes and almost nowhere else.

How each app sees your kitchen

SuperCook starts from a list you build. You pick ingredients from a database of roughly 2,000 items — typing or voice dictation both work — and it matches what you select against a catalog of around 11 million recipes pulled from 18,000 websites. That index is the app's whole identity, and it is enormous.

ShelfLife starts from your receipt. You snap a photo after a shop; AI vision reads every line, Gemini cleans up the brand names and sorts categories, and about three seconds later your entire haul is inventoried — produce, store brands, bulk-bin items, deli, bakery, everything on the paper. A multi-provider AI cascade with automatic failover estimates when each item expires, and 7/3/1-day alerts tell you what to use before it's too late. If you want the full walkthrough, we wrote one: how ShelfLife works, receipt to reminder.

Feature comparison

ShelfLife vs SuperCook — feature by feature

Feature	ShelfLife	SuperCook
What it is	Food expiry tracker with recipe matching	Recipe finder powered by an ingredient list
Input method	Receipt photo — 3 seconds, zero typing	Pick ingredients from ~2,000-item list, voice dictation supported
Recipe index	Curated matches from your real, receipt-verified inventory	~11M recipes from 18k sites
Expiry dates	✅ AI estimates on every item	❌ None
Expiry alerts	✅ 7/3/1-day notifications, urgent items ping within the hour	❌ None
Receipt scanning	✅ Core feature	❌ No
Recipe matching basis	What your receipt proves is in your kitchen, with expiring-item boost	What you picked from a list
Eat This First (urgency ranking)	✅ Scores items by expiry urgency + recipe match + value	❌ No concept of urgency
Rescue Mode (rescuing expiring food)	✅ Emergency recipes, zero-cook fixes, freezer saves for 20+ items	❌ No
Waste tracking / Savor Score	✅ 0–100 score, streaks, badges	❌ No
Offline	✅ Works offline (device cache + USDA-derived fallback)	Recipe search needs connectivity
Price	Free (25-item cap); Pro $1.99/week, $6.99/month, or $14.99/quarter	Free core; premium adds calorie tracking

What SuperCook does well

Credit where it's due — two things, specifically.

• The recipe index is enormous. Around 11 million recipes from 18,000 sites means whatever odd handful of ingredients you name, SuperCook will probably find several matches. No curated catalog that small can compete on raw selection.
• Building the list is fast and the core is free. Voice dictation over a ~2,000-ingredient database is a clever input method, and the core matching costs nothing. There's no inventory commitment — open it, name five things, get dinner.

If your actual problem is "I have eggs, half a cabbage, and sausage — what do people make with this?", SuperCook is the better pick. It does that one job quickly, for free, with more options than anyone.

Where the two approaches split

SuperCook's ingredient list is a snapshot of what you claim to have. Nothing verifies it, nothing maintains it, and — the bigger issue — nothing tells you when those ingredients turn. The half-cabbage you named on Tuesday has a use-by window whether or not anything tracks it. The average US household throws out around $1,500 of food a year, and most of it dies in exactly this gap: you knew you had it, you just didn't know it was going.

ShelfLife closes the loop. Receipt scan, AI expiry estimates, alerts, then recipes chosen because something is expiring. Eat This First ranks tonight's candidates by urgency, recipe fit, and value; Rescue Mode handles the panic case with emergency recipes and freezer saves for 20+ items. The recipes come to the expiry, not the other way around.

The list you maintain vs the list that maintains itself

Here's the quiet failure mode of every pick-your-ingredients tool: upkeep. The list is only as good as your last edit session. Bought cilantro on Saturday? Add it. Used the last egg Tuesday morning? Remember to remove it. SuperCook has no way to know any of that happened — and after a couple of weeks, the honest thing is to admit you're no longer matching recipes against your kitchen, you're matching them against a stale memory of it. That's not a knock on the app; it's just what the design can do.

ShelfLife's list updates itself because it starts from the source of truth: the receipt. One photo after each shop and the inventory is current — names, quantities, categories, all read by AI vision in about three seconds, with Gemini handling brand-name cleanup. The only habit you need is "snap the receipt when you get home," which is why the habit actually sticks. If you want the deeper mechanics, we broke down exactly how receipt scanning works.

Two questions, two apps

Ask yourself which question you're actually trying to answer on a Tuesday evening:

• "What could I make with what I've got?" — That's SuperCook's home turf. No inventory to maintain, a colossal index, and a free core. Hard to beat for pure inspiration.
• "What do I need to use before it goes bad — and what's the best thing to cook tonight?" — That's ShelfLife's turf. It knows what you bought because it read the receipt, it knows when things expire, and its recipe matching boosts whatever is closest to the edge.

Plenty of people will end up with both on their phone, and that's a fine outcome. But if food waste is the thing that bugs you — the slimy spinach, the third block of cheese that went furry — only the second question saves money. Our pantry inventory basics guide covers why that habit, not recipe inspiration, is where the savings actually come from.

Price comparison

SuperCook keeps its core matching free; its premium tier is mainly about calorie tracking. ShelfLife's free plan covers 25 items and includes unlimited receipt scanning, AI expiry estimates, alerts, Eat This First, Rescue Mode, recipe matching, Savor Score and streaks, plus CSV/JSON export. Pro is $1.99/week, $6.99/month, or $14.99/quarter (best value) — unlimited items, unlimited receipt-scan saves, full AI expiry estimates on anything, and household sharing with unlimited members.

Those aren't really competing prices. If you only ever wanted recipe search, SuperCook's free core is enough. ShelfLife's pricing buys tracking — the part that actually stops waste. For a broader field, see our best food expiry app rundown.

What people actually use them for

Community sentiment tracks the split you'd expect. SuperCook users praise it for clearing out odd ingredients before a shop and for finding options nobody would think of. ShelfLife users talk about the opposite moment — the alert that saved the chicken, the receipt scan that replaced an hour of typing. Both are real wins. They just happen at different points in the food's life.

One note on the recipe lists: ShelfLife tells you when something expires, but you're still the final judge of what's safe. We're not a food-safety authority. When in doubt, throw it out.