How to Organize Your Kitchen Pantry
In this step-by-step tutorial, I’m showing you how to organize your kitchen pantry by designing your pantry to help you make healthy food choices.
Remove everything from your pantry.
Clean
Gather your baskets, glass jars, and clear storage containers.
Remove your food items from the box if the box is bulky.
Group foods into categories: grains, canned beans, tomato products, baking, snacks etc.
Place the healthy food at your eye level.
Hide your guilty snacks in the corner.
Place extras on the bottom shelf.
Video Tutorial Below
the before
Remove everything from your pantry.
It is easiest to start with a clean slate. When your corner pantry is completely empty, you can actually see the entire space and make a plan for where you will place everything.
Clean
A pantry can hide a lot of random food that has fallen through the wire shelves.
Be sure to dust the wire shelves and sweep before beginning!
Gather your storage containers
Examples:
baskets
clear glass jars
clear plastic storage containers
Where do you buy pantry organization containers?
Target, Walmart, Amazon, HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, IKEA, thrift stores
4. Remove your food items from the box if the box is bulky.
For example, I removed the whole grains from their boxes and placed them in clear glass jars.
I removed all of the individually wrapped snacks and placed them in white narrow baskets so that I could see what we had available and what I needed to restock.
I took crackers out of their boxes and labeled them with a sharpie so that I could fit more crackers in a large white basket.
I took nuts out of their odd-shaped containers and placed them in narrow glass containers.
5. Group the food into categories.
6. Place the healthy food at your eye level.
I placed whole grains, beans, canned tomatoes, and healthy ingredients on the left side of the pantry at my eye level.
When I am looking at what we have to make dinner, I want the healthy dinner options to be easy to see, easy to plan, and easy to reach.
The fewer obstacles you have towards your goal, the easier it will be to complete your goal.
7. Hide your guilty snacks in the corner.
All of my Oreos and chocolate snacks are in the basket in the far corner. It sometimes gets hidden from me when we have lots of stuff in the pantry.
This is strategic. I don’t want to be tempted to eat my Oreos and guilty pleasures every time I open the pantry.
I want to put obstacles in front of the habits that I want to minimize. For me, that is decreasing my amount of sugar intake.
So I placed my guilty snacks in the corner, where it easily gets hidden from my view and I have to pull out other baskets in order to pull this basket out.
8. Place extras on the bottom shelf.
My husband and I have a Sam’s Club membership, so we like to keep an extra bag of flour available for baking, extra avocado oil and extra virgin olive oil.
Anything extra that you don’t need in your cabinets, can be stored on the bottom of your pantry.