The item buried at the bottom of the chest freezer under six months of subsequent purchases, still in its original packaging with no visible date, is not food — it's a question mark. It might be fine. It might be well past its quality window. It might be something you bought in bulk with the intention of using within three months that's now been there for nine. Without a log, the only way to know is to dig it out and investigate, which is why the chest freezer eventually stops being a food storage system and starts being a graveyard of questionable proteins.
The Expiration Tracking Problem
Date of freezing and Deadline are the two dates that define the usable window for each frozen item. The USDA and food safety authorities publish recommended maximum freezer storage times by food category: ground beef, 3-4 months; whole chicken, up to 12 months; cooked casseroles, 2-3 months. Knowing the freezing date against those category-specific windows is what turns the chest freezer from storage into a managed resource.
Deadline — the expiration date or the calculated latest use-by date — is the field that enables filtering for imminent expiry. Filtering for items with a Deadline within the next 30 days produces the use-it-now list rather than requiring a manual check of every item. In a household with multiple freezers or a commercial kitchen freezer with dozens of stored items, that filter view is the weekly meal planning input.
Date de péremption (French: expiration date) is the secondary date field that appears to capture the original manufacturer's best-before date separately from the freeze date — useful when the freezing date is later than the original package date, which requires calculating the remaining quality window from both data points.
Multi-Freezer Location Management
Freezer is the field that solves the multi-appliance problem. A household with a fridge-freezer, a chest freezer in the garage, and a dedicated upright freezer in the utility room has three separate storage locations with different organization systems. Without a location field, the inventory tells you what you have but not where it is. Freezer combined with Category and code creates a retrieval address — the fish is in Freezer 2, in the seafood section, code F-23.
Category is the organizational layer that groups items by type: meats, seafood, vegetables, cooked meals, breads, fruit, dairy. Category-level filtering shows you the total inventory of a specific food type across all freezers — useful for bulk buying decisions (do I actually need more chicken breast, or do I have three portions already distributed across two freezers?).
Stock Identification
Food and Amount with Units are the basic inventory fields. Amount and Units together handle the quantity variation — 3 portions, 500 grams, 1 bag, 2 fillets. As stock is used, the amount field gets updated (or the entry is deleted when fully consumed) to maintain a live inventory count rather than a historical record of what was put in.
Photo is the identification field for items that aren't labeled clearly or for prepared items that can look identical once frozen. A photograph of the container of frozen soup labeled with code makes it retrievable in a freezer full of identical white containers. code is the label reference — the number or code written on the container that matches the record, solving the "which batch of pasta sauce is this?" problem when several identical containers are stacked.