INTELLIGENT EXPIRY DATE RECOGNITION AND ALERT SYSTEM

In supermarkets such as D-Mart, Reliance Smart, and More, customers often purchase packaged items, which may have QR codes providing product information but customers tend to miss out on the expiry dates. The consumption of expired products can cause health problems and dissatisfaction to the customer. In this study, a smart expiry date recognition and alert system is proposed which will read the expiry date either from the product QR code or printed text using OCR and provide a visual alert via an LED [6]. The system consists of a microcontroller, such as Arduino a QR code scanner, and a real-time clock module OCR to determine the validity of the product. A red LED indicates the product is expired, an orange LED indicates the product has less than one month of remaining shelf life, and a green LED indicates the product is safe to use. This system can reduce the manual effort of expiry date checking, limit the usage of expired products, and improve consumer safety and trust with retail environments.