I have a small pantry, and I finally found a way to store canned goods that I am happy with.
I looked into the rolling can racks and decided that they wouldn't suit my purpose. They take too much space per can, and it isn't modular enough for my needs.
Here's what I did. I noticed that the canned goods I buy come in only a few sizes, and most of them are the same size.
- small cans (mushrooms, tomato sauce, corn)
- regular cans (the most common size)
- large cans (canned pineapple)
- squat cans (tuna fish, canned chicken, etc.)
Here's what I did for the regular & small cans, and I am about to do with the large cans. I built little boxes that hold four cans lying on their sides. One box fits very nicely on my pantry shelf. I have over a dozen of these boxes stacked on my pantry shelf. Each box has up to four cans of identical food. I use a magnet to roll the cans out, and a string to hold the cans in the front. This way, I can store over fifty cans (with over a dozen different types) with very little wasted space, and easy random access to any single type of canned good.
For rotating the stock of canned goods, I have my "understock" under the kitchen sink. I have more canned goods in similar boxes. When I run out of say, green bean in the pantry, I pull out green beans from my understock and fill up the pantry. When I move the last green beans from understock to pantry, I know that it's time to by a dozen more cans of green beans. The new cans of green beans go straight to the understock. I don't worry about the rotation of the cans in the understock, because they were all purchased at the same time, and I don't buy more until the understock is empty.
What I like about my system:
- It's easy to keep a decent rotation on all of my canned goods.
- I have immediate random access to whatever type of canned good I want.
- I can remove whatever cans I want at a time without disturbing any other cans.
- I have very little wasted space in my pantry due to stacking canned goods.
- I never worry about running out of a particlar type of canned good, because I have an automatic trigger for when to buy more.
My next project is cages for organizing food in my freezer ...
-Kuovonne