Here is a practical guide on how to organize a kitchen pantry.
While every home section has unique importance, certain areas are more crucial than others.
The kitchen is one of such. This is often considered the heart of the home due to several reasons. It’s where meals are made or prepared; hence, it is called where life is lived.
Kitchen Pantry Organization Ideas
The pantry sections of kitchens are where most food is stored. This area (the pantry) tends to be the hotspot for pest activity during an infestation. It’s so for a good reason.
These pests also seek nourishment from whatever they can come across in the pantry. A cluttered and disorganized pantry has a lot of downsides.
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Why You Should Organize your Kitchen Pantry
If you’re having difficulty locating certain things in your pantry, it’s probably time to organize them.
The difficulty you face finding what you left there is directly tied to how cluttered or disorganized it is. So, are there any incentives attached to tidying your kitchen pantry? There are.
Pantry Organization Tips
Through tidying and organizing, you save money, use valuable space, have better food utilization, reduce pantry pests, and do easy cleaning.
These are clear incentives that would benefit anyone taking the time to tidy up their kitchen pantry. Let’s discuss what these are.
i. Saving Money
How does organizing your kitchen pantry relate to saving money? This is a point that’s likely to confuse some readers. The answer lies in keeping track of what you need and don’t need.
Frequently, people purchase things they already have in their pantry, which creates unnecessary expenses.
ii. Making Better Use of Valuable Space
When you tidy and organize your kitchen pantry, you’ll notice more space you never thought existed.
More room is created naturally because food items are correctly arranged and stacked. This allows for more usable space, which can be better utilized.
However, proper organization is needed for this to be possible.
iii. Better Food Utilization
Not having a complete idea of food items in your kitchen pantry makes it more challenging to figure out what to prepare or cook.
With some tidying and organization, you can tell precisely what you have left and what’s needed. This leads to better food utilization as you’re inspired to cook more often than usual.
iv. Reduction of Pantry Pests
When it comes to pests found in kitchen pantries, there are lots of them. Some of these include roaches, red flour beetle, weevil, rice weevil, ants, flour beetle, and a whole range of others.
You can eliminate these and dispose of infested food with tidying and organization. This makes your pantry free of these pests.
v. Ease of Cleaning
One of the noticeable things about organizing a kitchen pantry is that it tends to make it much easier to tidy up the area as we advance.
You can better widen down surfaces due to the absence of clutter, which can be a headache. With this reality, your kitchen is better maintained.
Organizing a Kitchen Pantry
With the benefits listed above, it’s pretty apparent that organizing your kitchen pantry benefits you in several ways.
However, this process isn’t done haphazardly but systematically. This calls for adopting specific approaches or tips, including properly separating foods and placing like items together.
More kitchen pantry organization tips include decanting certain food types like flour, properly labeling pantry jars, and having a separate section for kitchen appliances.
Let’s have a look at these pantry organization tips, shall we?
i. Clearing Out the Pantry
To begin with, tidying up and organizing the kitchen pantry will require clearing out every single item.
This is necessary to help clean out the area in readiness for tidying. During such cleanup, you’re likely to notice stored food or grains long past their expiration date.
Some of these may contain pantry pests. All of these should be disposed of immediately to prevent further contamination of other food items.
After cleaning and wiping down the pantry, you’ll need to start arranging things.
ii. Proper Separation of Foods
When arranging your kitchen pantry, you must understand that certain food items don’t mix.
Mixing them up may lead to faster food spoilage. So, for example, you’ll need to avoid placing onions and potatoes in the same place. These need to be separated to prevent spoilage.
What more? Your food flavorings need to be separated from strong-smelling ingredients like spices.
Placing these items together leads to the absorption of specific flavors, which can ruin or affect them. Have your bread also separated. It should be positioned differently. The bread box will serve this purpose.
iii. Placing Like Items Together
Unlike separating certain food items discussed above, you must place some other things together. These are like items that won’t deteriorate.
For example, all cooking oils will need to be placed in the same section of your kitchen pantry.
Grains must be in the same section, pasta in the same unit, and spices have their area. Your milk, tea, coffee, and beverages should also have their sections.
iv. Decanting Certain Food Types
Decanting certain food items tends to offer multiple benefits.
First, it adds to the aesthetics of your kitchen pantry. Secondly, these help keep pantry pests from getting into grains and flour. So, you might want to provide pantry jars for this purpose, to begin with.
v. Proper Labeling of Pantry Jars
It’s not enough to have certain foods stored in pantry jars.
You’ll need to have these jars adequately labeled to be more organized. You can adopt several labeling options, including directly writing on these bottles. Each jar will have its food ingredient.
vi. Maintaining a Separate Section for Small Kitchen Appliances
We have a suggestion if you have more space in your pantry and wonder what to use it for.
You can convert such space for storage of small kitchen appliances like blenders, juicers, rice cookers, pressure cookers, and the like.
With the tips above, organizing your kitchen pantry shouldn’t be a complex procedure. We’ve discussed accruable benefits and how to go about the process.
