fridge organization

Tip #1 I learned from Balcony Garden Web and it is to have an “Eat Me First” container for all the food that will expire soon. I love how it puts the focus on the items that need to be eaten before they expire and it reminds me to try to incorporate them into my meals before anything else. Smart!

Tip #2 is to use crisper bins or drawers! Supposedly the fruit and veggies can circulate air and not get crummy at the bottom in crisper bins. After reading more about these bins, I realized that our fridges, or at least most, come with the crisper drawers built in for your fruits and veggies to balance humidity.

Vegetables last best in high humidity and fruits in low humidity. Most fridges will have settings on the crisper drawers to adjust the level of ventilation. If your french door fridge does not have these drawers, you can also buy crisper bins individually.

Next is tip #3: consider taking veggies out of the plastic when you come home. This varies on the produce, but wirecutter had a really handy chart that showed which produce should be removed from their original container or not.

If you do this, consider how you’d want to organize your vegetables, especially if they are touching and affect the flavors and or ripening of nearby veggies.

I also realized I was contributing to the carbon footprint poorly by all my plastic use and should do a better job at visiting farmers markets. Here in America, we do have a heavy usage of plastic, which is terrible.

Tip #4 is to meal prep your food first, then organize it in the fridge.

This makes the MOST sense to me! We are more of a meal prepping family. There is no cooking during the week like incredibly time-savvy people do, okay. During the week, we are workin’, gymmin’ and tv watchin’ people. So I loved the idea of sorting meals out into containers then organizing those meals in the fridge versus organizing ingredients and not leaving space for leftovers/meals etc.

These are the best meal prep containers we use (they are glass , affordable, and the perfect size!).

Tip #5 is to have matching containers or bins for your food organization, namely glass or fridge/freezer friendly ones. I’ll share about my favorite fridge organizers below. This just helps the fridge look SOOO good and I know many people reading this care about that kind of stuff.

Tip #6 is to either plan which organizers you’ll buy ahead of time for your fridge organizing extravaganza OR do what I did and buy an excess amount of them so you have OPTIONS when organizing. I also do this sometimes for my decor pillow planning, by the way.

When it comes to organizing a french door refrigerator, the good thing is that there is a lot of space to work with. The first thing I did was experiment with different container sizes in my fridge to see which sections I could carve out and which sizes I preferred based on our needs.

Essential Organizer Bins And Containers For Fridge Organization

Which leads me to Tip #7 which is to consider your lifestyle. For example, I remembered John and I go out to eat at least once a week and we usually have to go boxes. When I was planning out my fridge containers, I thought having a wide clear storage bin for to-go boxes would be perfect! 

Tip #8 is to separate your juices or other large containers of liquid into smaller jars. I got these jars on amazon that fit perfectly on the top shelf. I got both 8 oz glass jars for juices and 16 oz glass jars for things like coffee or flavored water. These jars are also pretty handy if we were making our own dressings or sauces OR if we wanted to send something home with our guests, such as apple cider during the holidays! 

Overall, I feel like sorting out the liquids promotes us drinking them versus having the large bottle just sitting there taking up space and they’re great for on-the-go.

Tip #9 is to check if you have a counter depth fridge or not. We do NOT have a counter depth fridge. After testing these bins in the fridge, we still had space behind them. So I realized we probably could have been fine going with a counter depth fridge.

HOWEVER, I did look it up and saw they tend to be a bit pricier. I’m fine with the extra space in the back if we ever needed it. Or we can push the bins further back and have a bit of space in front of the bins – *if needed*.

Which leads me to tip #10 which I learned from The Home Edit book. It’s okay to pull your items to the front and have unused space behind them IF that’s going to keep you more organized. Honestly, that has worked wonders for our pantry spice organization, which I have a video on that one too!

Overall, the concept is that you don’t need to move things around to see what’s behind, instead, it’s all in the front and there is nothing hidden.

As I was playing around with the bin layout, things got a LITTLE TRICKY as the bins were rubbing against one another so tip #11 is to aim for 2/3rds full fridge instead of a full-full fridge.

I don’t know how possible that is for most people, because we all have different fridge sizes, maybe have a lot of people in the house, and sauces are taking up like 53% of the fridge.

Comment down below if your fridge has been commandeered by sauces like ours has!

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