How to Organize Your Food Pantry

Guest post from Dollie Freeman

Having an organized food pantry can really help a family save on a food budget and is a challenge worth taking on. I would like to share with you some of the ways our family has organized our food pantry, on a budget, while helping us save money by doing it.

How to Organize Your Food Pantry:

We purchased quality containers for some of the things we use all the time, from our bulk spices, to our grains that we use to make much of our food. However, one of my favorite ways to organize our food pantry on a budget is to re-purpose containers that we purchase items in bulk at wholesale stores.

 

Here are the items that we put into containers, to organize and also keeps our food fresher longer:

• Cereal – We take the cereal out of the boxes that they are in when we purchase them and put them into containers that are easy to pour from. No more stall cereal!
• Pasta – We use a lot of bulk whole wheat pasta in our homes and have reused containers that we have emptied from crackers or pretzels we purchased that containers were perfect for our pantry organizing
• Oatmeal – We purchase 50 pounds of rolled oats and put that in buckets, then also in smaller repurposed containers for easy use
• Grains – We mill our own flour to use in our recipes, so we like to put them into containers with handles, in order to make it easier to use when baking
• Spices – With our large baking menus, we go through a lot of spices and we find that using small glass containers work best for these after they are opened. We store the unopened bulk containers for our spices in larger plastic bins, with the baking items in one and the spices in another.
• Nuts and dried fruits – We go through a lot of nuts and dried fruit and storing them in glass containers have proven to be the best way. Raisins can really make a mess in a container and storing them in glass container, with wide mouths, make them easy to serve and then clean in the dishwasher when needed.

I hope this finds you inspired to take the homemaker’s challenge and organize your pantry, in the efforts to save even more money in your budget.