12 Pantry Storage Mistakes You Need To Stop Making Yesterday

Tired of food going to waste because you didn't use it before the expiration date? Done with buying duplicate ingredients you already have but forgot about because they got pushed to the back of your pantry? You're not alone — these issues affect even the best of us and can cost money you might not have to spend. 

One way to prevent wasteful spending is to ensure your pantry is well-organized. When you can find anything you need, you'll be less likely to throw away your hard-earned money because you don't have a good grasp on what's in your pantry. Intentional shopping starts with learning the best tips for saving money in grocery stores.

The next stage is organizing your pantry. We have your back if you don't know where to start or often repeat the same organizational mistakes. We've compiled this list of some of the most common pantry storage mistakes people make so you can avoid them the next time you reorganize your food storage space. By evading these blunders, you can finally make all your pantry woes come to an end.

Unlike the perishable items you generally put in your fridge, a lot of foods you store in your pantry will have relatively long shelf lives. That doesn't mean, however, that these foods will stay good forever. That's why it's so important to pay close attention to expiration dates. Knowing when certain foods will go bad (or start tasting less than fresh) can ensure that you can use them by their best-by dates. That being said, if you stash older food in the back of your pantry, it can be easy to forget about them. This can lead you to use recent purchases instead of older items. 

That's why it's so important to take expiration dates into consideration when organizing your pantry. Place the oldest food items with the earliest expiration dates in plain sight, ideally lined neatly at the front of the shelving unit. When you organize this way, you'll be more inclined to use these older items first, saving the newer ones with later expiration dates for future use. Therefore, when stocking your pantry with your latest grocery haul, stock from the back — not the front.

Have you ever looked inside someone's pantry and seen those cute, rounded containers holding everything from oatmeal and cereal to rice and pasta? These pantries usually look great, and you may be tempted to snag some of these rounded containers to give your pantry that super-organized appearance. However, rounded receptacles like glass jars may not be your best bet for food storage, especially if you have limited space in your pantry. Why? Because the containers don't line up nicely with straight edges, you'll waste a ton of room on your shelving unit.

Your best bet is to find square or rectangular containers. They are easier to label, preventing those mishaps where you mistake salt for sugar, for instance. Such containers also eliminate dead space between receptacles since they line up with each other. This is especially important for city-dwellers or anyone with a particularly small kitchen, where an extra few inches of space in the pantry can make a big difference in terms of food storage. So, no matter how much you love the look of those rounded containers, square or rectangular is usually the best way to go.

If you have limited kitchen space, then you may be inclined to store items in your pantry that normally don't belong. However, to keep the space clean and hygienic, you should never store certain purchases there. Perhaps the most obvious is perishable food — these belong in the fridge, not the pantry. Without refrigeration, they will expire faster, leaving you with a mess you'll have to clean up later. You're also likely to forget about them.

Furthermore, do not keep pet food in the pantry, as it attracts insects. The same goes for open packages of food. While it might seem convenient to put unsealed foods in the pantry, they'll stay fresher and insect-free if you store them in sealed containers or bags instead. And, of course, you should avoid keeping expired food in the pantry. They take up room you could use to store other items. Expired food can also mess with your meal plans. For instance, you might be fooled into thinking you can make a tuna dish due to its availability; however, that can of tuna should've been thrown out months ago.

If you live alone and are the only one with access to your pantry, then you don't have to think too critically about placement when organizing. But if you live with others — especially children or people shorter than you — it just makes sense to consider their accessibility.

For instance, you shouldn't put the kids' after-school snacks high on the shelving unit; they'll be unable to reach them when hungry. Similarly, your partner's favorite protein bars should be at eye level — not stuffed in the bottom of the pantry where it's easy to miss them if they're not looking carefully. For the best pantry-organizing results, work with your family members or housemates to determine where different foods and ingredients should go so everyone can have easy access. 

When organizing your pantry, one factor is probably more important than anything else: how often you use certain items. If you eat oatmeal every day, you don't want to keep it at the back of your pantry, where you have to fish around for it every time you want a bowl of oats. Similarly, storing your green tea bags at the front of the shelving unit doesn't make sense if you only make the tea once every few weeks.

Be honest with yourself about what you use frequently and what you employ on occasion to organize your pantry effectively. Don't stick stuff up front just because you intend to utilize it often. If you don't already have a good sense of what gets the most action in your pantry, monitor your eating habits for a few days or up to a week before reorganizing your pantry. Chances are, you'll have an easier time finding what you need on a regular basis.

If you keep liquid or saucy products in your pantry, then you've probably experienced a spill or two on the shelves. The sticky residue can make bottles or jars adhere to the shelf, making it difficult to remove. Even worse, it can attract pests, particularly if the substance is sugary. If the spill doesn't attract bugs or mice, it will give your pantry a messy and unkempt appearance, which isn't ideal when attempting the most organized space possible.

That's why it's so important to clean spills and sticky messes as soon as possible. Ideally, you'll take care of this before the spills dry, at which point they can be quite a bit harder to eliminate. Even if it takes you a while to notice the damage, you shouldn't let those messes stick around for long before you clean up, as well as anything affected. You should also check bottles and jars for spills after use to prevent these messes from happening in the first place.

Does it ever feel like you don't have enough room to store everything you need in your pantry? That may be because you're not using your vertical space well enough. There are only so many free spots on your shelves, which can limit the amount of food you can keep in your pantry. But there are ways to maximize that vertical space to accommodate more items without some finding a home on your kitchen countertops.

The easiest way to use the vertical area in your pantry effectively is to stack items on each other. This works especially well with cans and items you don't use frequently (and therefore don't need to access all that often). But you can also add extra shelves to your pantry to create more vacancy. Racks can help get spices and other small containers out of the way. Once you start using the space in your pantry more efficiently, you'll be amazed at the number of items you can pack in there.

Another reason for buying food you already own is that you're not storing similar items near each other. Just think about it: You're planning to make a pasta dish, but you notice you only have half a box of penne to feed your family, which probably isn't going to cut it. So, you go to the store and pick up a few more boxes of penne. 

Upon arriving home, you start rummaging through your pantry again for other ingredients. Then, you find an unopened box of penne stuffed in the back of the pantry, on a different shelf than the half-empty box. By storing similar items near each other, you can prevent this mistake from happening in the first place.

Do you have tons of cans of beans in your pantry? Make sure to place them next to each other so you never have to go digging around for black beans again. Similarly, bags of rice and other grains should be grouped. You should also have a designated space for snacks. By organizing this way, you'll have a better sense of the food you have on hand, and you won't have to constantly dig through your storage to see what you can make for dinner.

You might want to reorganize your pantry occasionally to make sure everything is in the right place. If your pantry is disorganized and you're constantly forgetting about food you have stashed among the messes, then it's time to start from scratch. This is when you may want to take everything out of your pantry before reorganizing. It can be so easy to simply shuffle things around and assume that you've put everything in its correct place. But until you take stock of what you have by removing all your food from the shelves and putting it back, there's a good chance you'll still deal with the downsides of disorganization.

Ideally, you'll want to do this when you have plenty of time to reorganize. Therefore, you may want to pick a weekend when you don't have much else going on. First, remove everything from the pantry and throw away anything past its best-by date. If you know you won't use something that's still good, donate it to a local food pantry. Clean the shelves in your pantry, and then utilize the organizational tips on this list to make sure every item has a place. By taking the time to remove everything from the pantry before you do anything else, you'll be amazed by how much you may have missed otherwise.

If you spend a lot of time on social media, then chances are that you've seen many aesthetically pleasing pantries that are so well-organized that they seem aspirational. It's easy to want to achieve this level of organization in your home, but remember that these photos are generally used to promote a product or lifestyle. When organizing your pantry, it's best to do so with functionality instead of aesthetic appeal in mind.

That might mean not spending money on fancy-looking containers that take up just as much space as the food's original packaging. Or stacking food on each other in a way that wouldn't look good if you were to post a photo on Instagram. Ultimately, your pantry is just a place where you store your food. Therefore, making sure you have access to everything you need to cook a good meal is more important than getting the latest, most attractive-looking pantry products that don't serve much purpose.

When you get the urge to organize your pantry, you may be tempted to buy a ton of organizational items to help you make the space look tidier. In some cases, you may not need additional storage containers (and you're just using your reorganizing session as an excuse to buy more stuff that will clutter your pantry even more). But even if you need extra storage containers to keep things as neatly as possible, you'll want to make sure that you're taking stock of the space before you buy anything. After all, if you don't, you may buy storage containers that don't fit the space or the purpose for purchasing them.

Before shopping for containers, measure your pantry to get a good sense of what will fit, and think about what needs a separate receptacle apart from the packaging it already comes in. Yes, this adds another step to your organizational process, but it's better than buying items you ultimately can't use.

It's tempting to think that once you stage a big organizational re-haul of your pantry storage situation, you will forever have a tidy space where nothing will get lost or mislabeled again. But this just isn't reality. Most of us use our pantries on a regular basis, which means stuff is always being added, taken out, and moved around according to what we shop for and have on hand. Therefore, organizing your pantry has to be a task that you must return to time and time again.

Ideally, if you have a good organizational scheme in place, you'll only have to make little changes every once in a while to keep things organized. But be prepared to reorganize your pantry once every few months for the neatest space possible. Yes, it can be a hassle, but all that work is worth it to ensure you don't spend time and money buying food you don't need just because your pantry is a mess.