Saving Money by Organizing Your Pantry

When you are trying to decide what to cook for a meal, nothing is more frustrating than deciding on something, getting it started, and then discovering that you don't have an ingredient that is really important in your recipe. The easiest way to avoid this is just to stay organized. Keeping your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer all organized can prevent this from happening again. It can also save you both time and money.

An organized kitchen will save you time in three ways. The first way is the time it takes you to look for things when you are trying to cook something. If you know right where everything is supposed to be, you don't have to dig through everything else to find something. You can also save time by organizing because it prevents you from having to run to the grocery store after you have dug through everything to get that one thing. You will know whether or not you have the item so you can cook something else if you need to. The third way you can save time is when you make your grocery list. One look through organized food storage areas will tell exactly what you are low on.

There are a few ways organization saves money, too. The first one is that you will be able to use stuff before it goes bad. Organization will also help you decide how much of an item you should buy when it's on sale. If you are running low on a family favorite, a sale would be the perfect time to stock up. However, if you already have plenty of something, you should skip the sale. Organization can help you decide which of these is the case. One last way that you can save money goes back to that grocery store trip for one main ingredient. Running to the store will cost you gas money and possibly more money for impulse purchases.

The easiest and best way to organize a really messy pantry is to pull everything out, and then decide where every item should be. It will probably take you a while, but just remember all the time and money you are saving. It's definitely worth it to organize it once, and then do a small maintenance organization once or twice a month, instead of letting it get back into total disarray. The maintenance organization can be especially important when you have several other people who take food out and put food in your pantry.

When you are deciding on your original organization, keep in mind what kind of things are popular in your house. It wouldn't make much sense to put something in a corner that is hard to reach, if it is something that your family eats at least once or twice every week. These kind of items should be in an easy to reach area of the pantry.

Another thing to consider in the placement of items is the amount of space they will take up. If you have a pantry with shelves of varying height, it makes sense to put things like cereal and crackers in the taller shelves. If you plan on using sales to stock up on food, you need to really take advantage of all of your pantry space.

One more idea is to try to keep things grouped together, such as canned fruit, canned vegetables, and then canned beans on one shelf. Of course, within each of these groupings will be a few rows, each with only one type of food in them. Your shelf might look something like: four cans of peaches, three cans of pears, six cans of pineapple, two cans of cherries, three cans of fruit cocktail, etc. Try to keep everything nice and organized with like items in rows going straight back. This will make it very easy to find out when you only have one or two of an item remaining and need to buy more.

One last tip is to put things with the closest expiration date close to the front. When you buy more of an item, place it behind the other like items. When you do your maintenance organization, check the expiration dates on stuff. If you see that something is getting close to the date, try to plan it into a meal soon.

If you have a family, there will probably be times when your pantry isn't organized. Don't give up. Just straighten everything back out and remember the time and money you are saving.