In a previous blog post I discussed pantry storage in small spaces. This is a topic that affects many of us. I hope you were able to take away some useful tips for yourselves.
When one thinks of stockpiling, they surely imagine a cellar full of canned goods and jars of preserves. Perhaps you remember this from your grandparents. Supermarkets and gas stations with their to-go sections have made it easy for us to be supplied around the clock. But I still remember the times when there was 'long Thursday'. That was one day of the week when you could go shopping after 6:00 PM. Otherwise, stores were closed on weekdays by 6:00 PM and on Saturdays even by 1:00 PM. During those times, it was common practice to plan and stock up on meals in advance.
Is stockpiling still socially acceptable?
What has contributed to the fact that stockpiling is now frowned upon and no longer socially acceptable? At our house, we always made a meal plan for the week. This allowed me to look forward to my favorite dishes. Since I've been living alone, I continue to do this just like at home and am always well-prepared for spontaneous visitors. Fortunately, there are still households that stock up like in grandma's times. This is practiced, for example, by larger families and by people who live further away from the hustle and bustle and the constant availability of food.
With today's post, we want to raise awareness and show you how to create a supply that is up-to-date and suits your eating habits. Moreover, it won't immediately burn a hole in your wallet when you start stocking up.
Prepared for the worst-case scenario!
The Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) recommends maintaining a permanent supply for 10 days in case of an emergency. It is clear that in our country, we are well taken care of and it is rare that an emergency supply is necessary. However, if we look back, there have been incidents that allow us to relax with a supply tailored to our needs in extreme cases.
When stocking up appropriately, the BBK's list can be helpful to get an initial overview. However, one should pay explicit attention to their eating habits. After all, what good is a can of corned beef if you are a vegetarian? Moreover, one should keep in mind that a supply should not only be useful in everyday life but also practical in extreme cases. For example, dry products like legumes and grains can be stored for a very long time. However, their preparation requires additional water and they have a long soaking or cooking time. In the event of a power outage, this can adversely affect meal preparation.
Your inventory digitally represented on the tablet with our app.
Good planning pays off!
If you want to start stocking up your supplies, good planning pays off. What's always on your meal plan when you go grocery shopping, and what can be easily prepared in an emergency? This consideration ensures that food that is not useful for you doesn't end up in the trash later. Once you have figured this out for yourselves, you can easily use our App to set the minimum stock level for common products, and you'll always be informed when something falls below the minimum stock level. This way, you can start by building a supply that might last for 2-3 days. If that goes well and you still have space, you can increase it to last for additional days.
What should you consider?
When thinking about long-term food storage, canned goods immediately come to mind. Sure, canned food has a long shelf life and is also relatively inexpensive. If you generally don't use canned food often, it shouldn't be the first choice for stockpiling. Moreover, they are not exactly a healthy option, and especially if cans are dented, they should no longer be used.
What should you know about canned food?
Are canned goods in the pantry really a healthy alternative
No to canned food, then what?
An alternative to canned goods are preserved foods in jars. Nowadays, there's almost an alternative in glass for everything, and you don't have to compromise on shelf life. Plus, you can see if something has gone bad prematurely.
Keep track of supplies, groceries and durable products before small price increases turn into unnecessary extra costs.
Or try it right in your browser — no install neededBread from the Weck jar - stays fresh and lasts long
Bread in a jar - always fresh and long-lasting
Bread is one of the food items that spoil the fastest. This poses a greater challenge when it comes to food storage. However, if you bake bread in a jar, its shelf life can be extended up to 2 weeks. Moreover, it is a healthy alternative since it does not contain any preservatives that would extend its shelf life. In our next Saturday Blog we will show you how easy it is.
Are you now inspired and ready to get started? That's good. If you haven't used the app yet, download it HERE and digitize your home supplies. Set your minimum stock levels and gradually prepare for your stockpiling.
I wish you lots of fun! Yours, Alice
The recent Berlin power outage reminded many people: emergency preparedness isn't prepper folklore but everyday common sense. Germany's civil protection office recommends households keep a ten-day stock. Sounds like a lot – it isn't, if you approach it right.
Important: the numbers are guidance, not dogma. A stock made of things you genuinely like gets maintained – one made of dusty specialty cans gets forgotten.
The smartest emergency stock is a "living stock": buy a little more of what you use anyway, always eat the oldest first, and restock. Nothing expires and nothing costs extra. Our guide which foods to stockpile shows what works best.
A checklist on the fridge is outdated from day one. In Smantry you instead define minimum stock levels for your emergency items: the app shows how many days you are covered, warns about expiring items and automatically puts missing things on the shopping list. The preparation statistics give you the full picture.
You don't have to buy a 10-day stock this weekend. Add three extra items to your next shop, record them in the app, and repeat for a few weeks. Preparedness is a subscription, not a sprint.
The internet is full of before-and-after photos of perfectly sorted pantries. What you don't see: what they look like eight weeks later. Order that lasts isn't created on one big cleaning Saturday but by a system that works with your routine – three building blocks of 5 minutes each.
Not the whole pantry – just one zone. This week the pasta shelf, next week the cans. Expired items out, opened items to the front, quickly update the stock in the app. After a few weeks everything has been covered once, without it ever feeling like a project. The idea behind it is explained in our article on the 5S method.
The use-it-up zone is the game changer: it turns "there's something in the back somewhere" into a visible cooking assignment. Our leftover recipes supply the ideas.
New to the back, old to the front – sounds trivial, but fails without an overview of expiry dates. That's where digital tracking helps: Smantry sorts your items by best-before date and reminds you in time. Our guide shows how to model storage locations, shelves and compartments in the app.
Organizing systems fail at the entry barrier, not at willpower. Three small weekly habits beat any mega cleaning day – because they happen on the side, before chaos even builds up. Start with a single zone. Today.
In August, gardens and markets overflow – and in January a tomato costs three times as much again. Canning closes exactly that gap. You don't need grandma's canning machine or a cellar shelf: a big pot, clean jars and one afternoon are enough to get started.
1. Sterilise jars and lids in boiling water for 10 minutes. 2. Fill hot, prepared food (tomato sauce, chutney, compote) to 1–2 cm below the rim. 3. Wipe the rims clean and close firmly. 4. Place the jars in a water bath and process for 30–90 minutes at 90–100 °C depending on the recipe. 5. Let them cool – the lid must curve inwards. If it doesn't, refrigerate and use up soon.
Pickled and sugar-rich preserves usually keep 6–12 months stored cool and dark. What matters most is checking: inspect the lid, look, smell – and when in doubt, throw it out.
Home-canned jars have no barcode – with Smantry you can print your own barcodes and record every jar with its use-by date. The app reminds you before the winter stew quietly expires on the shelf. Our article on storing autumn treasures shows the best storage spots.
Since version 1.39, two updates have been released, and together they shift the app’s focus. Until now, it was mainly about recording and keeping track of individual items. From now on, it’s about your inventory as a whole: With the new inventory mode, you can update an entire stockroom in just a few minutes, minimum stock levels tell you what’s missing rather than just what’s there, and the interface has been redesigned in the places you tap most often.
The most common reason why inventory in an app eventually becomes inaccurate is simple: over time, a gap develops between what is listed and what is actually on the shelf. Until now, your only option was to correct items one by one. Now there is a dedicated mode for that.
The inventory mode doesn't start with your entire stock, but with the question of where you are right now. You select a storage location—“pantry,” “freezer,” or “cellar”—and Smantry shows you only the items stored there. The on-screen prompt says it plainly: _“Start taking inventory right in front of the storage location.”_ That's exactly how it's meant to work—phone in hand, cupboard door open.
The counting flow itself is deliberately kept simple so that it runs quickly:
Two details that make the difference between a counting aid and an honest supply:
Which unit do you mean? If a product with multiple expiration dates is stored in the storage location, Smantry does not guess. When you remove a unit, it asks: _“Which unit are you removing?”_—and indicates which one you should use first. When you add one, it instead asks for the new unit’s date, which you can either copy from the existing stock or enter manually.
Why is it being removed? When you reduce a quantity, Smantry asks why: _“Did you use it up, or did you have to throw it away?”_ This ensures that anything removed during an inventory count is included in your waste figures—instead of being hidden in a silent adjustment entry.
An inventory count is only worthwhile if it ultimately leads to action. That’s why the process doesn’t end with “saved,” but with a summary: how many items you checked at this storage location, how many stock levels were adjusted, and how many items were removed—broken down into used up and discarded.
And then comes the part that saves you work: Smantry lists everything that has fallen below your minimum stock level during inventory directly underneath—with a button labeled "Add to shopping list". From the shelf to the shopping list, with no extra steps.
For this to work, Smantry needs to know what counts as “enough.” You define that in the minimum stock levels—not laboriously for each individual item, but by category: two kilos of flour, six liters of milk, ten packs of pasta. The screen continuously shows you how many categories are active and what is still needed to reach the minimum levels.
New in the inventory list is the handy filter: “below minimum stock”. With a single tap, it turns the inventory list into a list of missing items—the view you actually want before going shopping. (A frequently requested suggestion from the feedback portal)
And if you're starting from scratch, you don't have to come up with the numbers yourself: Use "Load template" to import a ready-made set of minimum stock levels. The quantities are then scaled to the number of people and the desired period—you say "3 people, 10 days," and Smantry does the math.
The most important of these templates is the emergency supplies table from the German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK). It is now available as a template in Smantry, using the published table as its source—so it contains the quantities actually listed there, rather than estimates. The source is identified in the template dialog, and a preview shows you what will be imported before you apply it.
This is accompanied by a small but important correction to the preparedness indicator: An item can now be marked as "Do not count toward emergency supplies"—intended for anything that may be on the shelf but won't keep anyone fed in an emergency. Wine and sweets are listed as examples directly in the setting description. This simply makes the statement "Prepared for 12 days" more accurate.
At the same time, we’ve refined the interface in the areas where most of the action happens. Not as a redesign for redesign’s sake—the list of changes may sound unremarkable, and that’s exactly the point:
The cleanup list introduced in version 1.39 has gained the step it was missing. When you remove an item from it, Smantry no longer asks why in a text dialog, but instead displays two illustrated cards: used up or thrown away. You can grasp the difference in half a second instead of having to read it.
The fact that the loading spinner appears on the card you tapped may sound like a minor detail—but it makes the difference between “I know what’s happening” and “I’ll tap again.”
We’ve made adjustments to the new durability screen introduced in 1.39 based on the feedback we received:
Sign-in now takes place on a dedicated, secure sign-in page (`identity.smantry.com`) – and best of all, it opens with a single tap and already knows whether you wanted to sign in or register. Cases that previously resulted in two accounts being created because an email address was already linked to a different sign-in method now prompt you for confirmation instead of displaying an error.
By the way: New accounts are now set up in your language. Previously, welcome content and emails could appear in English without warning, even though the app was running in German.
A large part of the work in these two versions is invisible in a private household, because it is meant for businesses: households can now belong to a company, with roles, seat-based billing and a log of every stock change. In the app you only see what concerns you — the note “This account is managed by your company”, for instance — and the option to issue material to people and take it back, right on the phone.
If you use Smantry professionally, write to us and we will show you.
Smantry 1.42 is available on the App Store and on Google Play. One tap on “Update” is all it takes — then give the new inventory mode ten minutes. One storage location is enough to see the point.
Do you have feedback on the new features, or an idea for the next version? Tell us directly in the app via the support chat or in the feedback portal. The “below minimum stock” filter, the one-tap calendar and the month-only mode all started there.
