Organizing Food Storage Containers

How to Organize Food Storage Containers. How we stopped all of our leftover containers from falling out every single time we opened the cabinet.

Are you tired of digging around for food storage containers for your leftovers? Do your plastic containers and lids fall out of the cabinet every time you open the door? Please tell me I’m not alone.

This week I had HAD it with our leftover containers. It was time to start organizing food storage containers in our house.

We keep our leftover containers in a cabinet right next to our sink. It’ a good place because, in theory, we can easily fill leftover containers while cleaning the dishes. But, for some reason, the cabinet had become a catch-all for all sorts of random things.

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How We Organized Our Food Storage Containers

We started off by taking everything out of the top two shelves of the cabinet. I didn’t do anything with the bottom shelf, because that holds a lot of things we use for cooking (the cabinet is also to the right of our stove). Boy, there was a lot of stuff in there!

I decided to only put food storage containers back into the top two shelves. All of these treasures had to be relocated:

I put all of our food storage stuff together.

 

Then I organized them by type.

All of the containers went on the bottom shelf.

All of the lids went in these little bins. The round ones are in one bin, and the rectangular ones are in another bin. Hopefully this will make it easier to find tops that go with the containers.

The lid bins went on the top shelf, along with our mason jars. I left the lids on top of the mason jars because I thought it would be a hassle to dig around them when searching for other lids.

Here’s the finished food storage organization project:

 

How to Organize Food Storage Containers

• Find all of your food storage containers, and put them together in one place.

 

• Get rid of the containers that are nasty, don’t have lids, or are just annoying. If you don’t use it, get rid of it. If you are struggling with this, read How Many Food Storage Containers Does a Woman Actually Need?

 

• Put like items together. That way you’ll be able to see just how many lids you have, and how many containers you have.

 

• Stack the containers. Stack all of your rectangular containers together. Stack the circular ones together. Stack similar lids together.

 

• Decide on a good area to keep your food storage containers. We use ours a lot for leftovers, so we keep them in a cabinet right next to the sink. That makes it easier to pull them out when we’re cleaning dishes.

 

• Clean out the area where you plan to put your storage containers. If you need to, wipe it down and get rid of crumbs or other craziness that might be lurking there.

 

• Put your storage containers away first. Then do the lids. Consider storing the lids vertically to save some space. You could put them in a bin or even an old cereal box with the top cut off to save space. Just use whatever you have on hand.
• Celebrate! Your food storage containers are organized and easily-accessible!
• Use your new organization system. Is it working for you? As you go through the process of using your food storage containers, you might think of ways to improve your organization system. Make tweaks and modifications as needed.