Getting your kitchen pantry and refrigerator organized can seem like a daunting task. With over 20 years of experience working in professional kitchens, I know how important functional and clean organization is and I have a few simple solutions that you can incorporate into your home kitchen. Whether you’re working with small budget or ready to invest in some longer lasting items to organize your kitchen, I have solutions for you. So let’s get started! All of the products on this list—on both ends of the price spectrum—are products that I use both personally and professionally to organize my kitchens. So by all means, you can choose one organization method or, like me, use a combination.

Kitchen Organization: Containers

Let’s begin our organization journey with finding the right containers to store your fresh and dry goods. The three things to keep in mind when organizing are 1. durability (for the sake of our environment and your time you want to store your food items in a container that you can reuse and have multipurpose uses); 2. transparence (seeing what you have is key to keeping organized), and 3. stackable (being able to stack your containers keeps them organized and visible and importantly is a huge space saver. You can build up instead of out when maximizing pantry and refrigerator space).

Kitchen Organization: Labeling

Now that you have the right containers to organize your pantry and refrigerator, let’s talk about labeling. Whether you’re storing fresh food items or dry goods you’ll want to include the date of storage. This will help you to keep things fresh and replenished when needed. Of course you should also label what the item is to avoid any confusion. I make a lot of sauces and dressings. It’s so convenient to quickly read the label of what is what, rather than having to open, smell, and taste to figure it out.

Kitchen Organization: Maximizing Space

Whether you have a studio apartment sized kitchen or a spacious chef’s kitchen you’ll want to organize to maximize your space. A decluttered kitchen cabinet or drawer makes multitasking cooking in the kitchen simpler and much more enjoyable. Here are a few ways I like to keep organized.