Meet SpoilSafe — Outage food safety and claims

Utilities

SpoilSafe

Outage food safety and claims

What SpoilSafe does

The power just went out. Two questions start costing you money immediately: what in the fridge and freezer is still safe, and how do you prove what you lost. SpoilSafe answers both — entirely offline, because the moment you need it is exactly the moment your Wi-Fi is dead.

Start the outage clock the moment the lights go out, or backdate it if you woke up to a dark house — the app helps you set an honest earliest-possible start time so the safety math stays conservative. From there, SpoilSafe runs the official USDA rules against your timeline: a full fridge holds safe temperatures for about 4 hours, a full freezer for 48 hours (24 if half full), and every category of food has its own disposition once those windows close. Instead of arguing over $400 of meat with zero facts, you get an item-by-item verdict — keep, use immediately, or discard — sourced from USDA FSIS and foodsafety.gov charts bundled inside the app.

Then comes the part almost everyone eats as a loss. Most homeowners and renters policies reimburse spoiled food after a covered outage, but adjusters ask for an itemized list with photos and replacement prices — and by then everything is in the dumpster. SpoilSafe turns the discard pile into a claim: photograph each item as you toss it, log the quantity and replacement value, and generate a clean, itemized spoilage report as a PDF you can attach to any claim or send straight to your adjuster. It is honest about the fine print too: spoilage coverage is often subject to your deductible, so the report is built to slot into a larger storm claim where it actually pays.

Between storms, SpoilSafe becomes your freezer ledger. Hunters, bulk buyers, and anyone with a chest freezer can keep a running inventory with photos and values — so if the grid fails while you are on vacation, the documentation already exists.

Every outage is saved to history with its timeline, verdicts, and losses, so repeat events on a shaky grid build a paper trail. No account, no server, no signal required.

• Outage clock with honest backdating for overnight outages • Item-by-item keep or discard verdicts from bundled USDA charts • Fridge, freezer, and chest-freezer inventory with photos and values • Photograph-before-you-toss spoilage logging • Itemized, adjuster-ready spoilage report PDF • Multi-outage history for outage-prone grids • 100 percent offline — works with the power out

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

• Outage Clock — One tap starts the outage timer; a backdating flow captures an honest earliest-possible start for outages that began while you slept. Live countdowns show the 4-hour fridge window and 24/48-hour freezer windows against your timeline.
• Keep or Toss Engine — Runs bundled USDA FSIS and foodsafety.gov disposition charts against the outage clock and each inventory item's category, producing per-item verdicts: keep, use immediately, or discard — with the rule cited on every verdict.
• Freezer Ledger — A running inventory of fridge, freezer, and chest-freezer contents with photos, quantities, and replacement values — built between storms so the documentation already exists when the grid fails.
• Spoilage Claim Builder — Photograph-before-you-toss logging turns discarded items into an itemized claim: each entry gets a photo, quantity, and replacement price, then exports as a clean adjuster-ready PDF with the outage timeline attached.
• Outage History — Every outage is archived with its timeline, verdicts, discarded items, and total loss — building a paper trail across repeat events on an unreliable grid.
• Safety Reference — The full USDA refrigerated and frozen food charts, browsable offline by category, plus the core fridge and freezer hold-time rules — usable even with no outage running.

Why we built it

During a power outage households have no record of when it started, no per-item guidance on what USDA says to keep vs toss, and no itemized photo-and-price documentation of what they discard — so they either eat risky food or trash hundreds of dollars of groceries, then forfeit the food-spoilage reimbursement their po…

What makes it different

USDA FoodKeeper (free, official) is static storage-duration lookups with no outage timer, no per-item verdict against YOUR outage timeline, and no claim inventory. SensorPush and Govee apps need $30-70 hardware and only alert on temperature — zero discard guidance, zero claim documentation. Insurer apps (Allstate, Sta…

Who it's for

Anyone who values a small, sharp, single-purpose tool that does one job well and stays out of the way.

In one line: Outage food safety and claims

Try it

See the Outage food safety and claims for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use SpoilSafe, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.