Review: Thrive Life Pantry Organizer

How much are you willing to pay for a really good answer for good access to long-term storage freeze-dried food cans?  If your answer is “A lot, as long as it actually is really good”, the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer system may be for you.

Why the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer for us?

We have both family size cans (big) and pantry cans (smaller) as part of our food reserves.  We do eat from them frequently, since we believe in buying what we’ll eat and knowing how to prepare our preps in a pleasing way.  Therefore, we wanted a way we could keep a lot of cans in an organized way, easy to access, easy to see what we have, but compact.  What we found was the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer; one for pantry sized cans and another for family sized.

I just put the pantry size organizer together this past week.  Here’s the lowdown:

Off on the wrong foot

Any time I start a project like this, Step 1 is to count the pieces.  Tricky, since I didn’t know precisely which model Salty had ordered; but it became clear that some things were missing.  Specifically, every single metal piece (the frame).

It’s never a good sign when your first picture is for Customer Service, to show what you did (and did not) receive.

We dropped a dime (that means, we called the company… it’s an old phrase)

When Salty calls Thrive Life, a check on their part (read, a good part of an hour on hold) revealed the box that held the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer frame was damaged in transit and returned to sender.  That’s where the situation sat for several weeks until I had time to try the construction and we asked after the missing pieces.  The shipping damage not their fault perhaps, but they weren’t what I’d call proactive about fixing the problem.  On the up side, they got right on reshipping the frame pieces.

The second set of boxes was really battered and I was worried something might have fallen out, but the piece count was fine this time.  That’s what I meant with the ‘perhaps’ the damage wasn’t their fault; the first shipment was returned for damage, the second was just luck nothing had fallen out of the ripped open ends, and the person on the phone told Salty they often had problems with those pieces.  Sounds to me as if a new plan for shipping those parts is in order.

Construction easier than expected

It was hard to visualize from reading the instructions how the thing was supposed to go together, so I just read every step very carefully and forged ahead.  I’m no great shakes at construction (understatement), but I can read directions ok, and these read like they were written by a native speaker of English.  (Since it’s a U.S. company, they probably were.)

The only tool needed to put the thing together was a rubber mallet.  The frame has eyelets and buttons; one piece’s buttons slip into the other piece’s eyelets, then you pound a bit with the rubber mallet to slide the button all the way down to the bottom of the eyelet.  This may sound like you’d end up with a shaky frame … but you don’t, so long as you pound the elements down well.  It’s also probably not too hard to undo any errors (there is lots of counting to place the frame elements correctly), but I didn’t have to find out for sure.

This is what the button and eyelet construction looks like when the buttons are properly seated.

Salty’s Note:

You have to admit, the wallpaper in our storage room is some of the most hideous 1970’s vintage little-old-lady wallpaper on the planet. The preps don’t seem to mind, so we leave it up.

The frame is complete; now it’s time to add the can tracks.

The plastic tracks for the cans just snap into place on the frame elements of the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer.  Then you use your cans to get them the right distance from one another and snap little plastic straps onto the undersides to hold the spacing.  They aren’t super-robust, but there’s no stress on them either, so it’s all good.

Success!

The cans rolled easily on every one of the tracks of the Thrive Life Pantry Organizer — more easily than in the CanSolidator we have for our conventional canned goods.  There’s a lot of food in a small space, easy to access — just as we’d wished.

Completed and starting to be filled.

Tips:

It’s not hard at all to resize the track cans if you need to. (Good feature by the way; it’s a lot easier than for the CanSolidator.)  Why would you need to resize the tracks?  Because you sized all the tracks with the same cans, then discovered that different companies have slightly different can sizes.  I fell for that one and had to resize half the shelves; but it was no problem.

To adjust track widths, you just pop the straps off their buttons, shove the tracks where you want them, then reattach in a different slot on the strap.

They sell a wire rack for $30ish you can set on top of the frame to put up to 150 lbs.  I plan on cutting some boards to do the same job.  There’s a 1″ or so lip up there around the frame top that will support the boards.

Summary

They’re a good product, and I’m glad to have them.  It seems they’ll do exactly what we wanted.

The customer service was completely unimpressive, particularly given the expense of the product.

Salty’s Note:

I was the person who, once we noticed the problem with the shipping, called customer service. The person who answered was friendly and she did eventually hunt down what the problem was, but it took the better part of an hour from start to finish and it was also a phone call I never should have had to make. When UPS notified the company of the damage, a re-shipment should have immediately been done.

When the frames arrived (we bought two racks) the boxes they were in were demolished, and we were concerned that parts might be missing. We still have to construct the next one but we have the same number of metal parts as the one that’s built already, so that’s a good sign.

Bottom line, though, is that Thrive does not adequately package these parts. They put heavy sharp metal in single-layer cardboard boxes and expects them to survive shipping. Not good enough. They need to rethink their packaging entirely, because the frames arrived with patches of cardboard left here and there around metal frames sticking out. There’s a lot of ways they could fix this without spending a bunch of money, not really sure why they don’t since it is apparently an ongoing issue.