One of the most important parts of having an affordable “deep larder” is keeping food on hand that A) you like eating and B) that stays fresh enough to not have a bunch of waste. Pantry organizers can help.
A big task, but a money saver in the end…
This is a big subject, and I am reminded of the old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Let’s take one bite of that elephant and look at one system we personally use our pantry organizers & racks.
There are many ways to make food rotation happen, here’s what we use in the Salty & Spice household, the Can Consolidator by Thrive. We also have purchased their rack systems for larger cans, which we talk about in this article.
Here’s a picture of ours in our pantry:
This rack eases in rotation of canned and jarred goods
Basically, this particular product is a plastic rack that you assemble and fill with cans, jars, whatever round items you choose. It is gravity fed, so as you pull the oldest can off the bottom, the newest can rolls backwards from the top. This both rotates the cans, and it makes it very simple to do a shopping list (you know at a glance what can or jar you need.
Here’s a diagram:
A cross section of the device…
How we “organized” our pantry organizers
We bought several boxes of can consolidator pantry organizers, and a metal shelf system from a big box store. We built our rack. Each row holds (depending on the can size 10ish cans. You can double up short cans like tuna, that works just fine.
The ones we purchased from Thrive are “snap together” allowing you to make different sized openings (you can see on ours that the one on the top-right is our peanut butter row, it’s bigger than the cans next to it.
It may not seem like it, but there are many, many different size of cans… so figuring it out is a bit of a challenge at first.
You can make your own pantry organizers out of wood
If you are handy with wood, you can make your own racks for much cheaper, but this system does work very well.
Things to consider
A couple of things you need to consider… how comfortable are you eating out-of-date canned food? Sometimes, you may not get all the way around during the time the can is “in date”. Nearly always food is both safe and tasty long after the “best by” date on the can, but how willing you are to push that is a personal decision.
One of the keys to making this work is not to put food you won’t regularly eat in the system. I bought some stuff the first time we stocked it that was great “survival” food but it was also stuff that neither one of us eats regularly. We ended up “forcing ourselves to eat it” one year after it’s best by date passed.
Again, there are MANY types of food rotation and this isn’t the only one we use… but I wanted to share it with you to get the survival food ball rolling here at 3BY.
Pro Tip by Spice: The Cansolidator can also be set to fit wide mouth glass canning jars with pressure sealed lids; at least the pint sizes. HOWEVER… the jars are weighty enough to force the ones on the bottom to roll out unless you put a block of some sort in there. So I do that; and also make sure the Cansolidator for the canning jars is at ground level in case Something Bad Happens. It did once and I got lucky, but people who count on luck watch upon watch, tack upon tack could also be called “fools”.
