FIFO (First In, First Out)

FIFO is standard practice in restaurant kitchens and grocery stockrooms: when new stock arrives, it goes behind or underneath the existing stock, so whatever's oldest gets pulled and used first. It's taught as a baseline food-safety and waste-reduction principle in professional food-service training, precisely because the alternative — grabbing whatever's easiest to reach — reliably means older items get pushed to the back and forgotten until they spoil.

Most FIFO content online is written for restaurant managers and food-service staff, not people managing one fridge for a household. The principle transfers directly, but almost nothing translates it into a home-kitchen habit — which is a real gap, since the underlying problem (older food quietly going off at the back of the fridge while newer food gets used from the front) happens in home kitchens just as much as commercial ones, arguably more, since there's no shift checklist enforcing it.

You don't need a labeling system or a rotation chart to get most of the benefit. Two habits do almost all the work: when you unpack groceries, put the new items behind or under what's already there rather than in front of it, and when deciding what to cook, default to what's already open or closest to the front rather than what's newest. It's the same logic restaurant kitchens formalize — just applied by feel instead of by procedure.

FridgeAI isn't an inventory tracker — it doesn't log purchase dates or run FIFO rotation for you the way a barcode-scanning app might. What it does instead: because every suggestion starts from a photo of your fridge as it actually looks right now, the ingredients that have been sitting there a while — the half-used pack of ham, the wilting herbs pushed to the back — are exactly what shows up in the photo and gets worked into a recipe, the same practical outcome FIFO is aiming for, without needing you to track anything.