How To Organise Your Food Cupboards: Ideas To Optimise Space
When it comes to your food cupboards, a little organisation can go a long way!
Struggling with an overflowing pantry? Unsure of the best way to store common food cupboard items such as tins and dried goods? Don’t know how to create zones within your pantry? Keep reading to discover the expert tips that can help with organising a food cupboard!
To help you kick off your pantry organisation, here is our 10-step guide to creating order and organisation in your food cupboards and setting up a pantry that is a breeze to use and maintain.
Step 1: Clean your cupboards
A simple enough start to organising your food cupboard, but it is essential nonetheless!
Begin by removing all food and other items from your pantry until all the cupboards, shelves and drawers are empty
Use a hoover or dustpan and brush to remove any crumbs and then give all surfaces a deep clean with hot soapy water
Dry off with a towel and leave to air dry whilst you get on with the next steps
You’ll be more likely to want to maintain your pantry organisation going forward if you start off with a clean slate!
Step 2: Audit your ingredients
On a work surface or kitchen table, begin sorting through the contents of your pantry, taking the time to go through every packet, tin and box to check for expired/stale/past their best products.
Discard anything that is no longer usable. If you come across anything that is still in-date but that you know you and your family won’t eat, donate it to a friend / family or food bank.
By clearing out these unusable items, you’ll be able to get a better sense of what there is to organise and you’ll be less likely to over-purchase on storage bins and containers.
Step 3: Create categories
With all the unusable and unwanted items discarded, you can now move on to creating food categories that will become the ‘zones’ in your pantry. Place like items together.
Common categories in a pantry include:
Dry goods
Canned goods
Baking
Condiments
Spices
Snacks
Breakfast
Oils and vinegars
Nuts and seeds
Breads
These are just examples and to ensure your pantry organisation suits you and your families needs you should create your categories to best suit your inventory.
Step 4: Decant items
Certain pantry items such as flours, pastas, grains and other dried goods that tend to come in packets benefit greatly from being decanted into airtight containers. These can be made of glass or plastic depending on your preference and pantry aesthetic.
Not only are decanted items great in terms of practicality; they stay fresher for longer and can be easier to access during the cooking process plus they can make for a very aesthetically pleasing pantry too!
Step 5: Contain categories
Now that your food products are categorised and decanted, you are ready to set up the zones within your pantry.
To aid your organisation efforts and ensure you are making best use of the pantry space you have available, you may choose to utilise some of the following pantry organisation products:
Step 6: Don’t forget to utilise doors
Adding organisers to the backs of your cupboard doors can be particularly useful if you’re short on space in your pantry. Free up some shelf space by adding over the door organisers such as spice racks or hooks to the inside of your pantry doors.
Step 7: Create a child friendly zone
If there are kids in your family, you will know that there’s always a grumbling tummy just around the corner. Why not create a child friendly zone within your pantry? Fill a bottom shelf or drawer with healthy snacks so that your kids can easily grab a snack on their own and even put away their own groceries!
As well as taking the burden off you to always provide their snacks, it will also help to instil a sense of responsibility and independence.
Having kids snack items grouped together will not only make packing school lunches simpler, but it helps to empower your little ones to take charge of their meal choices - win win!
Step 8: Add labels
Clear, descriptive labels are an essential part of any pantry organisation system. Labels will help to ensure items are always returned to their designated spot within the pantry and enable you to create an organisation system that is easy for the whole family to use.
We love the brother p-touch cube label maker which is quick and easy to use, allowing you to create and print labels directly from your smartphone.
Add labels to decanted products, onto the front of bins and baskets, directly onto shelves; the more the better! Just remember; every time a new category enters your pantry or a category is no longer required, update the labels to ensure the organisation system is kept up to date.
Step 9: Conduct a monthly maintenance tidy
It’s common for food cupboards to become disorganised over time, but with the above organisation in place this should be less likely to happen!
However, in order to keep your food cupboard spick and span, we always recommend a monthly maintenance tidy where you spend 30 minutes auditing ingredients, returning everything to its zone and adding new labels if necessary.
Step 10: Always check the pantry before grocery shopping
Our final tip to ensure your food cupboards never get back to the overflowing mess of their former lives; always check the pantry before shopping for new food. If there’s one way to clutter up a tidy pantry it’s by overbuying and having to store food unnecessarily.
A quick check before you go to the shops can work wonders on keeping your pantry organised and stocked to perfection.
Get your food cupboards organised today!
We hope these tips have inspired you to get your pantry organised once and for all! If you have any questions or need some professional help in planning out your dream pantry, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Homefulness professional home organisers are here to help with all your needs!