Scan your fridge with your phone: live scan is in Sugo
Sweep your phone along a shelf and Sugo names what it sees, counts each item once and lists it for you to check. Camera frames never leave your phone.
Live scan
Sweep the shelf once. Skip the typing.
Move your phone slowly along a shelf. Sugo names what it sees, counts each item once and waits for you to check the list.
Read on your phoneFree on every planiPhone, iPad, Android
Sweep, check, cook.
Every scan runs the same three steps, and the middle one is yours: nothing reaches the pantry until you have looked at it.
- Scan
Move slowly, watch the names land.
Each thing it recognises gets a bracket, a name and a chip along the bottom. An item joins the list only once it has held for three of the last five frames, so names do not flicker and a second pass does not add it twice.
- Review
Untick what it got wrong.
Everything lands on a list with a tick box and, where it can be counted, a stepper. Fix a count, drop a mistake, then add the lot in one tap.
- Cook
See what the haul makes.
Your pantry updates straight away, and your saved recipes are ranked by how much of each you already have. The ready-to-cook list gathers the ones with 70% or more of their ingredients on hand.
Seen forty times, listed once.
Your phone reads about ten frames a second, so the eggs turn up in dozens of frames. Live scan follows each item from frame to frame, and seeing it again adds nothing to the list.
One sweep along the shelf, and part of the way back
- Milk
- Eggs×2
- Cheese
- Mushrooms
- Carrots
- Lime
85
Frames read
6
On the list
Live scan or photos?
Both sit behind the camera button in your pantry: live scan at the top, photos underneath.
Photos
For a receipt, a shopping list or a haul on the table.
- Up to six pictures, read by a vision model in the cloud.
- Printed and handwritten lists work too.
- Can add things Sugo's ingredient list does not know.
- Counts toward a monthly allowance that depends on your plan.
Live scan
For a fridge, a shelf or a counter.
- Read by a model on your phone. Camera frames are never uploaded.
- Free on every plan, with no monthly limit.
- Reads package labels in English, French and Spanish.
- Adds items from Sugo's ingredient list, with a count rather than a weight.
Why it exists
Sugo's pantry ranks your saved recipes by how much of each one you can already cook. That is only as good as the pantry list, and keeping the list true has always been the weak point. Nobody types thirty items into a phone after putting the shopping away.
Live scan makes the job the length of one sweep. Open the pantry, tap the camera button, choose Live scan and move the phone slowly along a shelf. Everything it recognises lands on a list you check before anything is added.
How it counts
The phone reads about ten frames a second, so the eggs are in view for thirty or forty frames on one sweep, and again when you swing back. Adding up what it saw would give you a list of hundreds. Most of the work goes into deciding whether the thing in this frame is the thing from the last one.
An item joins the list once it has held in three of the last five frames. Each object is followed from frame to frame, and its name is a vote across every frame it appeared in, which is why a chip does not flip between shallot and onion as the light changes.
The list counts kinds of thing. Two tomatoes on different shelves are one row, and the number beside it is the most it saw together in a single frame. That cannot double-count a sweep, but it can undercount, which is why every countable row on the review screen has a stepper.
It reads the packet as well as the shape
A lot of a fridge is packaging, and a carton of oat milk looks much like a carton of stock. So live scan reads the large print on anything that looks like a package, in English, French and Spanish, and trusts the words over the shape. Phrases are checked before single words, so a jar of peanut butter does not end up on the list as butter.
It knows around 70 foods by sight, more than 40 others by their label alone, and can match common pantry items from the print on a pack.
What stays on your phone
The camera frames are read by a model that lives on the device and are never uploaded. What leaves the phone is the list you confirm, plus anonymous daily tallies of which kinds of item people kept or unticked, with no account, household or device attached. Those tallies show which names the model gets wrong most often.
What it does not do
Ginger, shallots, kale and parsnips are not recognised by sight. It can mix up onions and potatoes, and lettuce is hard once it is in a salad rather than a head.
It sees presence and a count, never an amount. Half a bag of spinach and a full one are both spinach. Eggs get no number unless it sees two apart, since a box of eggs is usually a full carton. It only catches what is in view, so the yoghurt behind the milk stays behind the milk.
The first scan takes longer. The model is a one-off download, which the app fetches by itself on Wi-Fi when it can, and preparing it the first time can take around half a minute on an older iPhone. After that the scanner opens in a couple of seconds. It needs iOS 17 or later, and it is not in the web app, where there is no model on the device to run it.
Does live scan upload video of my fridge?
No. The camera frames are read by a model on your phone and never leave it. Sugo receives the list of items you choose to add, and anonymous daily tallies of which kinds of item were kept or unticked, with no account, household or device attached.
Which phones does live scan work on?
iPhone and iPad on iOS 17 or later, and Android. It is not in the web app at app.sugo.kitchen; use photo scanning there instead.
Is live scan free?
Yes, on every plan, with no monthly limit. Scanning by photo, which is read in the cloud, comes with a monthly allowance that depends on your plan.
Why is there a download before the first scan?
The model that recognises food runs on your phone, so it has to be downloaded once. The app usually fetches it in the background on Wi-Fi once you are signed in, and later versions update themselves. The app shows the size before it downloads.
Can it tell how much of something is left?
No. It counts the separate pieces it can see, never a weight or a volume.
What happens when it gets something wrong?
Nothing is added until you have reviewed the list. Every row has a tick box, countable rows have a stepper, and you add the corrected list in one tap.
Read on
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Out now
Put one good dinner on the table.
Sugo is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, on Google Play for Android, and in any browser at app.sugo.kitchen. It is free to start, so start saving the recipes you actually cook.