Organizing your food storage can save money, time and hassle if done correctly. Items like chest freezers are important for keeping extra or bulk food items needed for bigger meals or items you use a lot of. Here are a few tips to help keep your chest freezer neat and organized.
How to Keep Your Chest Freezer Organized
Everyone uses their chest freezer differently, so it is hard to say what will work for you. It really depends on what you put in it. The last thing we want to do though is to fill it up and not use it! That’s why it is so important to organize that chest freezer.
Let’s take a closer look at how to organize a chest freezer.
Limit What You Put In
Since most households have a small to large size freezer attached to their refrigerator, you should really try and reserve items you put in the chest freezer. These might include items bought in bulk or on sale such as meat, frozen meals or homemade canned goods.
Think of the chest freezer are a backup source for products you use often.
Additionally, seasonal foods should be put in the chest freezer as well. For example, if you only eat chili in the fall then don’t keep frozen chili in your main freezer. Store these items in a designated spot in the chest freezer that way they will be readily available for the appropriate time of year.
Sort By Date
The number rule of organizing is to create a system that not only creates organization but keeps it going. It will be important to keep track of when items were placed in the freezer. Since chest freezers are for additional food, make sure you cycle through items in the freezer according to their date.
Chest freezers are deep and items at the very bottom can be hard to reach; it is highly important not to let older items get buried at the bottom. Also keep in mind that the longer an item is in the freezer, the more likely it is to get freezer burnt and become inedible.
Keep in mind that if you can’t see an item, you won’t know if it is time to buy more. If your family likes frozen pizza, but you don’t see any towards the top of the chest freezer then you just might go out and buy more for no reason.
Storage Possibilities
If you are wondering how to organize a chest freezer, your food storage is a crucial part of your over all freezer organization strategy.
Consider buying storage items like Rubbermaid containers and food storage bags to separate items by category. Try and sort items into as few categories as possible. Once you have regularly stored items into some sort of classification system, give each category a designated spot in the freezer.
For instance, you might want to keep meat towards the right, frozen veggies in the middle and kid friendly foods to the left.
Color coding these items will add another layer of organization to everything, too. You can do this with special colored tops or even by using different colored duct tape to label containers.
You can also completely separate items by the type of storage container you put them into; maybe you only put meat in square containers and vegetables in round ones. There are endless possibilities here!
Vacuum sealing foods can also help decrease the amount of space needed within the freezer. Getting rid of clunky boxes that many frozen items come in will help save space.
You can take these items out of the original packaging, vacuum seal it and place it in a colored bag that fits into the category.
So if there are things hiding at the bottom of your freezer that you haven’t seen in years, it’s time to organize your chest freezer!
