Pantry Planning

A pantry goes wrong for one reason. Food comes in packets of every shape, and shelves are flat. Everything else follows from that.

Group by when you use it, not by what it is

Most people sort a pantry like a supermarket: tins together, pasta together, snacks together. It looks neat and works badly. Sort by moment instead. Breakfast on one shelf, baking on another, lunchboxes in one basket. You reach for a meal, not a category.

Decant the things that never stack

Flour, rice, pasta, cereal, sugar. Bagged food is the reason a pantry looks chaotic, because no two bags are the same shape and none of them stand up. Straight sided containers of one or two sizes turn that shelf into a row. Leave everything that already comes in a tin or a box alone, since decanting those is work with no reward.

Put small things in a basket, not on the shelf

Packets, sachets, stock cubes and spice refills disappear behind bigger things and get bought twice. A single open basket you can pull out like a drawer solves it. Pull, look, push back.

Deal with the deep shelf

A deep shelf is really two shelves, and the back one is where food goes to expire. Either use a pull out bin so the back comes to you, or put the things you rarely need behind and accept it.

Tiered risers for tins and jars

You cannot read the label on the second row. A stepped riser fixes it for a few pounds of shelf depth, and it is the single change most people notice most.

Leave one shelf half empty

A pantry filled to the edges has nowhere to put a shop. Keeping one shelf loose is what stops the counter filling up on the day the food arrives.

Label at the front, not the top

You read a shelf from the side, standing up. Labels on lids are for drawers.

Working out what depth fits your shelves? Send us the measurements and we will tell you what to get.