A disorganized fridge can straight away become a big problem. A messy fridge can inevitably threaten your health and budget, from forgotten leftovers to missing ingredients. The exciting news is that you can smoothly dodge these issues by using just a few simple organizational strategies. Keeping your fridge organized makes the most of your available space and keeps everything fresh and ready to eat.
Clean and Sort
The first step to organizing a fridge is cleaning and sorting all your items. Remove everything out of the refrigerator, assessing for expiration dates, mold, or other signs of spoiled food as you go. Take away anything that is past the expiration date or looks dirty. For leftovers or food in plastic storage containers, if you’re not totally sure how long it has been in there, throw it out. When it comes to your food, it’s nice to err on the side of caution.
With everything out of the fridge, take the time to clean its interiors entirely. Wash and dry all surfaces, including inside drawers and bins, applying hot, soapy water or a mild bleach solution. Accordingly, you will set out with a clean fridge for your new organization system.
Label Everything
The next step to an organized fridge is to keep an inventory of how long your food has been there. Indeed, while it’s true that multiple pre-packaged foods will come with an expiration or sell-by date on them, for fruits and veggies or food that you bring home or that is leftover from meals, you’ll be bound to have a system to keep track of when it was added to the fridge and when it will need to be thrown out.
One useful guideline is to use a dry-erase marker to write the dates of meals and takeout on the container. You could act on the same thing for other perishables inside of your fridge. By noting both when you brought them home and when they need to be used, you can make certain that you are using up the groceries you buy before they spoil and avoid eating leftovers that can make you sick.
Use Containers
Keeping loose items tidy in a fridge, namely fruits, vegetables, and even small condiment jars, can be tough. Look into using clear storage bins to group loose items together to prevent clutter and make it a point you have everything you’re trying to find. Not only that, think of buying quality reusable food storage containers with tight-fitting lids. This can help you store food safely and reduce waste by reusing your containers again and again.
You can likewise use a dry-erase marker on the bins and storage containers to keep track of the date things were brought in. Using bins and storage containers in your fridge will free up space for more oversized items elsewhere and make tracking the expiration dates of perishable items far simpler.
Develop a System
As you hit the ground running with replacing items, it’s focal to develop a system for storing everything. This has two benefits: first, you will continually know where things are, and second, it can make your food last longer and be safer. Such as, for example, keep in mind that certain items should always be kept in certain places.
Meat should constanly be kept on the lowest shelf to avoid dripping and contaminating other food. Together with this, never store milk in the fridge door – it can spoil there and then when exposed to warm air a lot of times. You can also separate your fruits and vegetables and use trays for all those messy items to prevent spills.
Plan Ahead
Assuming your fridge is clean and organized, the major thing you can pursue is to plan and keep it that way. Even the most organized fridge will need to be cleaned up properly, and old items are thrown out often. Think of creating a cleaning schedule to make certain that your fridge stays organized. As an illustration, you could pick a day of the week or month to go through everything, rotating and updating your fresh produce, and wiping down fridge surfaces. By putting into effect this routine regularly, you can avoid the dreaded deep-clean and purge of your fridge (and freezer), a job very few are looking forward to.
By putting to use these easy-to-do guidelines, you can keep your fridge clean and organized week after week with less struggle than you thought seemingly possible!
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Originally Published on Nov 12, 2021
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