We looked at organising the kitchen in general then looked in more details at the kitchen shelves, cupboards and countertops. On this page, I will guide you through how to organise your pantry. Working on the pantry is a big job. I’ll break it down systematically and show you via a case study how I have used these steps in practice. You might be wondering; is there a best way to organise your pantry? I don’t think so, there are many different ways. Irrespective of how you do it, you need to break the job down in smaller manageable jobs. Really think through how you declutter and organise your pantry. These are the things nobody tells you about organise your pantry. On this page it is exactly what I am about to teach you.

Step by step approach to organising the pantry

In the video example below, I'm in one of my friends’ houses and we are going to look at their pantry.

Throughout I follow the following steps:

Taking everything out of the pantry
Declutter the pantry
Think about what we want and need from this place.
Put things back in an organised fashion.

Take everything out of the pantry

Most people’s pantries are full of stuff we cannot remember placing there so our first step when organising the pantry is taking everything out. We need to place all items on a big flat surface to see what we actually have. When taking the items out I also look at similar categories (“like items”). In the video I've taken a few containers to make this categorising easier. Using these temporary containers is helping us group like items together and get a clear idea of how the pantry will flow. The containers I use at this stage are not the final ones, but they can give us some idea of what we'll end up with and what we need when we start to organise.

Declutter the pantry

Another important thing to do at this stage is to declutter as you go. You will come across many items you can throw out as you realise you don’t need or use them.

For the pantry, items that you should really need to consider letting go are:

Over date food items in the pantry
Sauces, spices and exotic foods you either don’t like or won’t use

Be realistic in what you keep, this is hard but you are not helping anyone with holding on to food you will not eat. If you let it go and organise your kitchen for future you will have less and less of these ‘mis-buys’.

We also need to simply acknowledge that in our groceries shopping, we are bound to make some mistakes from time to time. In the overall scheme of things, kitchen and pantry purchases are mistakes we can recover from, isn’t it? Items are better out of your kitchen and pantry than cluttering the space long-term.

For food items, some councils actually have community kitchens that would love donations (if the foods haven’t been opened) but be realistic if you have no time or do not have the inclination to do this just get things OUT of the kitchen! As time goes on and we get better at organising we find we can give more and more to others.

You can watch the video of this first organising the pantry session here...

Journal Summary the first session - organising the pantry

For the first session we had an hour that was the maximum amount of time had to spend on it now.

The good news was, we made lots of progress! The bad news is we will definitely have to come back and finish the job.

In an hour I have been able to:

take everything out of the pantry
binning lots of items (once I had permission from my friend)
and putting what we are keeping back in the temporary containers.

Time to literally take stock

It's good to sometimes have a break, to check whether the system you're implementing is actually working and to take the time to get more containers.

Do you still want to keep the items you have selected now as you are seeing what you have, should you throw some more items away?

Key things to note:

Everything’s grouped together and it is easy to see where items “live”, we are starting to create a “home” for each item in the pantry, which is our main aim.

You can also see that this is basically a multiple stage approach. In many cases this is the reality of organising.

Taking a break

In the video above, we started to show you how to organise the pantry after a bit of a break we are back to complete the job.

The “break time” between organising sessions can be very valuable. It can highlight what organising tools you need, if your new system is working on needs to be tweaked. And it gives you a breather so you are tackling the next stage with energy and optimism.

Think through, what do you want and need from this place?

We spend some significant time thinking about what we wanted and needed from this place. Depending on your unique situation the answers will change.

In our case study:

· It had to be easy to find things, snacks for the teenager in the house needed to be on hand.

· Breakfast options needed to be clear and easy.

· Seeing volume and knowing how much we had of certain items was important.

In this case it was also good to see how much tea and coffee was in the house – reinforcing that for the next year tea will not need to be bought.

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Putting things back in an organised fashion

As I mentioned a little earlier on the page the type of container in the kitchen is really important. I find, the best ways to organise your pantry and make it look pretty, is if you go for see through and use the same containers in the pantry, fridge and freezer (this will allow for seamless organising throughout the kitchen).

As far as clever pantry organisation ideas and tricks go my best two suggestions are:

All the same see through containers (I have 4 different sizes throughout my whole house).
Think through what you need, when, how often and make that determine where you place your pantry items.

A word about kitchen containers and our case study

In the video I've just used the containers that I had - they are blue. Normally, I recommend see-through containers (especially for in the kitchen) because you can quickly see what’s in there.

Within our video example I've got a few different sizes. Normally, I would recommend sticking to 2-3 standard sizes but in this case the variety of sizes works because it's a corner pantry.

“Rules” on boxes and containers in the pantry

We need to acknowledge that pantries come in all shapes and sizes. That we have individual preferences in terms of how much food we like to store in the pantry and therefore we might need different sizes because of our different categories. In this video we have a big category for pasta, spreads, crackers and snacks. In your pantry this might be very different.

I tend to be reluctant to be too prescriptive in my organising advice. Yes, there are things that are considered best practise. However, your space, situation, preferences and insights might trump some (well-meaning) advice.

Journal - the second session on how to organise the pantry

Throughout the break we realised we actually had to get more containers. This is a session in and of itself, going to the shops or ordering online and waiting for it to arrive. Normally I like to err on the side of caution when buying items for organising. For containers however, especially when you selected which ones you like in your kitchen, you can go nuts, I buy heaps of them. These containers will come in handy. Alternatively you can bring them back with a receipt.

In the second session, we are organising the pantry and will use a lot of these new containers to put food in. I simply extended the work that was done before, when we grouped things together. At the organising stage we place food and other items in their final “homes”. It makes the categories all a bit clearer, to make it look more calm and organised.

Watch the second session here

How to organise the pantry – video debrief

Okay, we have finished the pantry. This was a big job but the result is amazing! A few things that I'll want to point out.

You saw me in this second part of how to organise your pantry- starting underneath. Normally I always recommend starting from the top and working your way through the bottom because dust travels down. But in this case underneath it looked really intense so I started with the biggest thing first. Doing this got the momentum going and things moving, which helped a lot (psychological and physically).
After doing the bottom, the top was basically pretty straightforward, once I took everything from underneath out, I started (as I did in our first session) to group things together.
I basically took a lot of containers that we had as temporary placeholders and I changed them with see-through containers. This makes the place look and feel much more organised. Especially for an areas like the pantry, you want to see exactly what you're after so see through stackable containers are the way to go.
Take note the great organising trick to double your space. You can see in the bottom of the pantry that I actually put an a little bit of furniture in to utilize this space more.
Lastly, we put things back in an organised fashion.

Final points to note

The pantry has been organised by using “zones”. In this case top-bottom, tea, items that are eaten frequently etc.

The top section is now all for party things for example; party bags, candles and glasses.

In this pantry we need to acknowledge there is a lot of tea. We make place for this and acknowledge that my does not need to buy any tea for a while.

Things we need have and shouldn’t eat often are in one corner, the lollies partly hidden so we she won’t be eating more of them.

We have eye height a lot of snacks as well as frequently used cooking things like; pasta, flour etc. I created a space with additional items that haven't been opened yet. There is also space for when new groceries come in.

The overall aim is that everything has a grouping of “like items” and it's really easy to find everything.

A note on labels:

If we needed to, we labeled with the original label of the packaging (a nice easy and quick way to label) but with a lot of things you don't have to label because you can actually see what's in there.

Although labels look cute in pictures, it could be an exercise in futility as containers and food items are continuously shifting their content. Before you label think through if you are getting value from the time and effort you put in. If not keep it simple and group things together.

There are many ways to organise your pantry, let me know if you have some treasures in terms of resources.

Good luck with doing your own pantry, let me know how you went.