I reorganized my pantry and I can't shut up about it

My husband Jamie is officially exhausted of hearing me say “don’t you love the spices?”

In case you haven’t heard, I reorganized my pantry last week. To say that I am excited about this is an understatement. Come over and I will undoubtedly mention it within moments of your arrival for the least humble brag of all time.

I work from home, I have two kids, and I’m a nutritionist who sends out a weekly meal prep email to over 5000 people. Organization is a necessity. I am also human—somedays I don’t feel like cooking or am not inspired; I might go to the store thinking I already have chickpeas and come home to none; or buy some cumin for the 4th time this year because I cannot see or find any of my spices (most of which are also expired). If I’m going to do this right, I really need to make it as easy as possible.

Every six months or so I clean out my pantry and I have bought all sorts of containers and things, but haven’t really been able to find a system that works for me. Somehow I also ended up with all these plastic bins from my old house. I really dislike them and they don’t fit my current pantry, but I also don’t want to just throw them away. It was time to seek professional help, and when my mom chat lit up talking about a local organizer (Rework the Room for my LA friends), I jumped on it.

A video of the before—don’t judge me!! Gahh.

Cleaning out your pantry has benefits beyond the obvious (and significant) visual satisfaction. It’s a great way to identify processed foods with seed oils or excess sugars and find healthier staples to have on hand. Check out my Thrive shopping list from last week’s email if you need help here, or feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Once you have your healthy staples organized and on hand, it will be easier for you to grab them. Life is busy, and we’re often going to make the choice of least resistance, whether that’s a bag of Doritos or a handful or dry roasted cashews. Make it easy for you to do make the choice you want to make.

In the 10 days since having a perfectly organized pantry I’ve noticed a few things:

1. Meal prepping and cooking is significantly easier when you can easily grab the ingredients and tools you need. My appliances, for example, were previously jammed in this one drawer and very hard to get out and put back in. I would often opt out of making a smoothie because I couldn’t deal with getting the blender out of the drawer.

2. I’m eating the food we have instead of constantly buying more. Seeing what you have will ensure that you use it, saving you money and creating less waste. Previously, I would buy cashews or pistachios and they would just sit there in the bag for eons. Now, I’m going through them and really enjoying them as a snack.

3. It’s easier to eat more variety. I do not have time to search through the pantry for niche ingredients but I want to eat them. I like using nuts, seeds, and spices in my cooking, but that’s hard to do if you’re in a time crunch and can’t see them. For example, I’ve been having yogurt for breakfast recently and love putting different high fiber toppings on it (basil seeds and Thrive coconut cereal are my current favorites). It’s so much easier for me to do this when it’s in the right spot and in an easy to use container.

4. My basics are organized and stocked. When everything has a place it’s easy to see what you need more of. I like having specific brands of crackers, peanut butter, cereal, kids snacks, and pasta, and just making sure we’re always stocked on those things. It helps helps you to be more intentional about the brands you buy and streamlines your shopping.

5. Cooking fun things takes less time. Time is always an issue, especially when you have two tiny (hungry) humans grabbing for you. Ozzie has been wanting sprinkle pancakes this week, and it’s taken me no time at all to make these because I know where the damn sprinkles are. The sprinkles, unsurprisingly, are from Thrive Market.

6. I remember to take my supplements. Yes, sometimes I forget (gasp!). I have so many supplements and I don’t take them all daily. Now I have this great little shelf next to the fridge that has all my current supplements. It’s so much easier to take them.

These are just iPhone shots, but you get the idea. MAJOR upgrade.

Products
A few things I bought to help me organize my pantry.

• Baskets: I really like the look of these white storage baskets (I’m now seeing that they have these slim ones too) mixed with some wicker baskets. I kept some of the old plastic storage bins that I’d had for years as well because they still worked, but adding in these other baskets made it feel less plasticky and they fit this pantry better.

• Glass jars: I’m not the kind of person who can keep up with decanting every little thing, but I do like to have things like nuts and seeds in these glass jars for easy use. The bags and bags of things get bulky and lost in the sea of pantry stuff. I also got these for cereal. They’re big but I love them and they come with a scoop. I might switch and use them for flour, but it’s working for now. I used labels to identify them — these are the ones I bought and I think they look nice.

• Spices: I looked around for different spice options and really wanted to buy the spice packets from Thrive, so I decided to get glass jars to put them in. Thrive also sells glass jars but I don’t know if they had labels, so I found something similar on amazon that came with a pack of spice labels. I also got a drawer spice organizer and I cannot tell you how nice it is to be able to see your spices! Game changer.

• Lazy Susans: I got two Lazy Susans for the corners to put oils and vinegars in. It saves space and is easy to use.