Perishable Shelf Stacking

Stocking frozen bread and chilled tortillas starts with a question that should take seconds: how long does this product last, and where does it go? In practice it means hunting through a paper list set in tiny type, warped by the condensation that comes off frozen product, and organized in a way that defeats any quick scan. Two to five minutes per product, dozens of products a shift.

Then two more frictions. A product can sit in four places at once — ambient bread section, ambient display, frozen section, frozen display — and those change often enough that memory is unreliable. And once you have the shelf life, you still have to do the date math by hand.

This app collapses all of that into one screen. Search by name or UPC, or scan the barcode with the device camera, and you get a product card with the brand, the sticker date already calculated from shelf life and today's date, and the exact shelf locations in a plain section/aisle/bay table.

The model draws a distinction the paper list never could: the date printed on the sticker is a perishable date, derived from shelf life at the moment the product moves from freezer to shelf — not the package's own expiration date. Both are tracked, which lets a shelf review screen group active product by urgency, so the date-checking pass skips everything that isn't near retirement or a discount label.

Accessibility drove the interface rather than decorating it: the original list was hardest on vision-impaired stockers, so text sizing, contrast, focus behavior, and screen-reader announcements are covered by property-based tests and automated axe checks alongside the unit suite.