Pantry Health Score — How PriceHunter Scores Your Pantry (and How to Improve It)

PriceHunter's pantry health score is a single number from 0 to 100 that tells you how well your pantry is being run. 80+ means a healthy pantry — nothing expired, most items dated, fresh stock. Below 50 means food is going to waste.

The score is calculated automatically every time you open your pantry dashboard. It is designed to make the small problems — one expired jar at the back, a half-forgotten category of canned goods — visible before they cost you money.

How the score is calculated

The pantry health score is a weighted composite of three sub-scores, each measured from 0 to 100:

• Use-by compliance (50%) — the share of dated items that have not yet passed their expiry date. This is the biggest factor because expired food is the main thing the score is trying to make you notice. If you have 10 dated items and 2 are expired, this sub-score is 80.
• Date coverage (30%)— the share of items that have an expiry date set at all. Items without a date can't be checked for spoilage, so coverage rewards you for filling them in. If 8 out of 10 items have a date, this sub-score is 80.
• Freshness (20%) — how new the average item is. Pantry items lose value the longer they sit there. The sub-score ramps linearly from 100 at age zero down to 0 at 90 days old. An average pantry age of 30 days scores around 67.

The final score is:

score = (useBy × 0.5) + (coverage × 0.3) + (freshness × 0.2)

What each score range means

• 80–100 — Healthy:Almost everything is dated, very little has expired, and stock turns over regularly. Keep doing what you're doing.
• 50–79 — Watch: Either you have a handful of expired items, a stash of things without dates, or some staples that have been sitting too long. Worth a 5-minute tidy-up.
• Under 50 — Needs attention: Several expired items, missing dates, or aged stock. Working through the expiring-soon list first is the fastest way to lift the score.

How to lift your pantry health score

1. Clear expired items first. Each expired item drops the use-by sub-score by 100/n where n is your dated item count. Removing them is the single biggest move.
2. Add an expiry date to every new item. Coverage is 30% of the score and the cheapest to fix. Date items as they go into the pantry, not later.
3. Set per-item alerts on slow-movers.If you keep losing the same jar of tahini to age, drop its alert lead time to 30 days so it shows up in "use soon" well before it expires.
4. Use the depletion trend.The 12-week sparkline on the pantry page shows you what's actually moving. If your "used" line is flat and the "expired" line is climbing, you're buying faster than you eat.

Why these weights?

Expired food is what costs you money — so use-by compliance dominates at 50%. Coverage is next because without dates, the use-by score has nothing to act on. Freshness rounds it out with the slow burn: ingredients sitting unused for months are signalling something even when nothing has technically gone off.

The weights were chosen so that a small, well-managed pantry can score 100, a typical household pantry lands in the 70–85 range, and a neglected pantry — with several expired items or major coverage gaps — drops below 50. If you want to override the score for your own household, the formula is fixed; treat the score as a relative trend over time rather than an absolute grade.

Frequently misunderstood

• An empty pantry scores 100.Nothing to spoil, nothing to score against. The first few items you add can drop the score sharply if they're undated.
• Undated items don't count as expired.They're penalised through the coverage sub-score, not use-by. Adding a date almost always moves the score up, never down.
• The score is per user. Households on shared accounts will see one combined score across whatever the signed-in user has tracked.