How We Organize Our Food & Pantry

Moving into this house provided some benefits that we didn't have in our last house. We have a pantry, and a ton of functional kitchen cabinets. I definitely don't claim to be the expert in home organization, but I thought I'd share what's been working for us so far, and hopefully some tips will work well for you too.

In our pantry, we store the foods that we reach for the most often. These are things like snacks for the kids, cereal for breakfast, workout supplements, and then canned goods, grains, peanut butter and items I need for cooking. 

We use two of the cabinets in the kitchen for food items. This larger cabinet has all of my baking items. I bought these round oxo containers when we bought our first house in Georgia. They've held up super well, but I didn't feel the need to spend the money on more containers, so I left the rest of the items in this cabinet in the original packaging. I think this can still look neat and tidy if you group like items together, move all items to the front of the shelf, and don't store more food behind other items. This is key to knowing what you have on hand and avoiding clutter. 

While I would love my pantry to look like the above picture all the time, the reality is that this house doesn't have a hall closet or anywhere practical for me to store my broom, mop, and vacuum, so they all get stored in here as well. 
When it came to organizing the pantry, I used these white containers that I bought a few years ago off of Amazon. Again, by grouping similar items in each basket, it keeps everything tidy, and gives the pantry that clean look everyone loves. I have all the kids snacks stored in this one basket, and I love having everything stored here and easily assessable for the kids, instead of there being 10 half opened boxes cluttering the entire space. 

In another basket I store all of our pastas and grains. I love the look when people have jars for each different type of pasta, rice, and quinoa, but we definitely wouldn't have had enough room for that in this pantry, and one basket was way cheaper, and less fragile than a bunch of glass jars. We have 7-8 different items in this basket, and they all fit perfectly, without spilling into other areas. 


In this middle section I like to keep all of our canned food. We only keep black beans, corn, and green beans on hand regularly, and then any other cans we keep in the house are things we'll use up for meals that week. I like this method because it means we use through the things we have, and I don't have to worry about finding a 10-year-old can of pineapple years down the road that never got used. I like knowing exactly what we have on hand, and knowing that there isn't anything going to waste. 

This next basket is super random. It has a few cans and different items we'll use for dinner this week, along with things we grab for all the time like peanut butter, nutella, breakfast syrup, etc... 

Lastly, the bottom shelf has items that don't get used too often, and our root vegetables. I keep most of my workout supplements down here in the basket on the right. Supplements I use are the WM Nutrition preworkout, Gateorade for recovery after really hot runs, and some energy gels to fuel me on runs that are longer than two hours. The middle section of this shelf has our protein powders, and then our root vegetables are in the basket on the left. 

In a perfect world, I'd like to get two more larger white baskets to go on the floor of the pantry for extra snack items, chips, etc... but for right now this works really well for our family, and we've surprisingly been able to keep up with this system, and keep it nice and tidy since the day we set it up! 

I'd love to hear how you setup your pantry, and what organizational tricks work best for your family!

Organizational Products Used:

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2 comments

  1. Great ideas! I need to organize my pantry so it's as cute as yours. :)

    Happy day rock star!
    karianne

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  2. I don't have a pantry but I like how you organize yours. It made me think of constructing one in the near future and hopefully I could do like how you did.

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