But if there’s one place to take notes from when it comes to food organization, it’s the grocery store. Here’s how you can apply the same methods to your own pantry to save space and reduce food waste.
Give Your Pantry a Grocery Store Makeover
Between cooking and snacking, quick trips to the pantry can lead to a whole lot of chaos. Grocery stores have stockers on staff to keep their shelves organized, but you don’t need to hire help to implement some of their best retail strategies.
In a subreddit dedicated to organizing, Reddit user @Violet_Crown shared the idea to sort food in a pantry “like you would find it in the grocery store.” It’s a genius way to think about organization — when you’re doing your weekly food shop, you usually know where to find what you need since similar items are grouped together. Applying this same approach to your pantry is a foolproof way to make items easier to find and ensure nothing gets forgotten. Not only does this cut down on food waste, but it also prevents you from buying duplicates of items you already own.
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How To Organize Your Pantry Like a Grocery Store
Giving your pantry the grocery store treatment is simple. Use clear acrylic bins, wire baskets, turntables, and shelf dividers to group like items with like. Keep pasta and grains together, baking essentials together, canned goods together, and so on. Clustering categories means you won’t waste time digging through a cluttered shelf. In their post, @Violet_Crown also recommends grouping smaller items in baskets, cooking oils and condiments on turntables, and canned goods with shelf dividers “for best use of vertical space.”
Other grocery store tricks you can use to your advantage include keeping frequently used items at eye level, moving older products to the front so you can use them before they expire, and storing heavy items on lower shelves to make them easier to retrieve.
