How To Organise Your Pantry, The Easy Way

The pantry is one of the most difficult things to organise at home. With such a huge variety of packets, boxes, bags, bottles, tins, shakers, and containers, all different shapes and sizes, a pantry can quickly become a chaotic mess that is impossible to navigate.

In this article, we’ll provide some expert tips on how to organise your pantry, so that you can quickly grab the snacks and ingredients you need without your blood pressure soaring.

How to organise your pantry

At the heart of every well-organised pantry is a good storage system. Here’s the full process on how to organise your pantry.

1. Remove the food from your pantry

First, you’ll want to remove every food item from your pantry and place them on your kitchen countertop. As you remove each item, have a quick check of the expiry date, and throw away anything that’s out of date, or looks like a biological experiment.

Once you’re done, now is the time to give the pantry a good scrubbing, to remove any food scraps for insects, rodents, and other nasties.

2. Organise your food into groups

Another excellent pantry organisation idea is to arrange your food into groups, in the way that makes the most sense to you. This might be grouping your tins, condiments, spices, fruits, chips, etc.

3. Consider the ideal pantry storage solutions

Next, you’ll need to determine the ideal storage solutions for each food group, the easiest way to access them, and the space that you have available. For example:

• Tins can sit on the shelf by themselves, and be stacked if necessary.
• Spices can either sit in a spice rack, a hanging rack, or on a lazy susan. In fact, lazy susans are a handy storage solution for many food types.
• Certain fruits such as strawberries might be best placed inside clear plastic containers.
• Chips or other packet foods can be placed inside their own basket, or hung on hooks that line the door or wall.
• Granular foods such as sugar, coffee, cereal, and flour should be placed inside airtight plastic containers. Certain foods will also need to have their expiry date added to a label for the container.
• Bottles can also sit on the shelf, and be grouped further based on their type (oils, sauces, etc.)
• Cling-wrap, tin foil, and other products can be placed on their own shelf.
• Pots and utensils: if you keep pots and utensils in your pantry, these are perfect for storing on hooks (if you have the room).

As you go through this process, try to visualise the motions you go through while cooking a meal or grabbing a snack. It can help to determine where things should be placed, and the most appropriate type of storage. If you’re struggling, baskets are always a great way to store related items, as they can quickly be pulled out and rummaged through to find the right item.

4. Purchase the right pantry storage

Once you have the best pantry organisation idea for each food group, you’ll need to purchase the storage itself. This will typically include clear airtight pantry containers, jars, baskets, racks, hooks, lazy susans, and labels for writing down expiration dates. You’ll also need to consider how much of each food group you usually have, and purchase multiple pieces of storage if necessary.

If you typically have open packets in your pantry, you may want to purchase some plastic clips or extra airtight containers.

For more information on how to organise your pantry and for all your self-storage needs, get in touch with More Space today.