Tag Archive: food

May
02

FrozenQueRy – the engineering of a freezer inventory app




As a young family, having meals together mean a lot to us. In Southern California where the pace is fast and the cost is higher, we turn to batch cooking to enable us to eat like a prince on a peasant’s budget, and save time on those busy days that spill into evenings.

Making extra portions and freezing them for lazier-to-cook days is relatively straightforward. However we quickly found it harder to remember what we had ready to heat/eat, which occasionally left us scrambling when we had one less portion than needed for a whole dinner, or forgot all together and succumbed to take-out or dine-out in our hunger-weakened decision moments.

Mitigation attempts had left us desiring more. The paper list taped to the freezer got messy with scribbled out tally counts over time, and only helped us when we looked at it at home. While we may have known there were 10 burritos floating around, we didn’t know when each were created. Combine that with the laziness on our part to hand-write dates on sticky notes for each item. Although we hadn’t yet encountered unidentifiable blocks of frozen blob, the potential certainly was there.

…As with anyone with legitimate engineering cred, this would not be tolerated for long without a sustainable solution.

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Sep
09

Why you don’t buy Asian from Whitey

The one from the Asian store is bigger




Our family here recently got into drinking Aloe Juice.  Aloe Juice in itself isn’t that new, but its a recent addition to our pantry.  Already knowing its not the best value, we were getting our hit from Trader Joe’s.  As a Southern Californian, we really do like TJ’s and they do have good prices on a lot of quality products that would otherwise cost more at other more elite and snobbish places.  Alas, most of those “quality products” refer to their produce, milks (cow, almond, coconut), some cheese and definitely wine ($2 chuck!!).  But value priced Aloe Juice??  Forget about it!!






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Oct
19

Warning: FIFO Buffer Underrun!




Grocery stores are full of inefficiencies, but the operators do realize it and try to balance performance with operational expenses. It costs a lot of overhead to have all-lanes-open, and the non-food-value added cost gets added to the price of food items. In a way to improve checkout efficiency, lots of stores employ checkout conveyor belts that allow customers to load the carefully selected items to be checked-out while the attendant is moving items along at the front. This enables the “workload” to be buffered for the checkout attendant (“the processor”). The FIFO buffer approach ensures that the workload is ready for operation when the cashier is able to pull it. If not for the conveyor belt, checkout throughput would be severely limited by the rate at which the customer can directly transfer items up to 2-3 at a time from cart/basket to cashier. See system diagram:






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