Adding a Pantry Organizer or Pantry Shelving to Your Kitchen

Having been out of fashion for years in favor of acres of base and wall cabinets in the largest single room possible, the kitchen pantry is back in favor. The reason is, they provide the most storage area for the buck.

There are three basic kinds of modern kitchen pantry.

The first is the most like your Grandma’s pantry: a small room or closet or area dedicated to storage of food and equipment. The difference between ours and Grandma’s is that hers was generally cool and humid, a good storage area for semi-perishables like cheese, butter and many vegetables and fruits. Our pantries tend to be warm and dry, best suited to dry and packaged foods. These pantries sometimes exist already in older homes, or are new-created in new kitchens or remodels. Their pantry shelving can be custom-fitted in depth and spacing to the items to be stored, or, even better, adjustable. There are many kinds of sturdy wall-mounted shelving systems that can be used in a pantry like this, or you can build your own to fit. Plenty of uprights or brackets and thick shelf material make for strong pantry shelving which will hold the weight of stacked plates, large bags of dry food, or stacks of cans.

The second kind of pantry in our modern kitchens is a regular cabinet – usually full height, sometimes a base cabinet – with special pull-out pantry organizer fittings which mean that the entire space can be packed solid with stored items but the whole shebang can be pulled out for easy access to everything, even things right at the back. Often these pantry cabinets are built as part of a new kitchen or replacement cabinets in an old one, but the pantry organizer fitting can potentially be added into existing cabinets.

The third type is a freestanding cupboard or cabinet, usually tall, with shelves. These are often purchased to add to inadequate storage in an existing kitchen.

Let’s take a look at some examples

Pantry Organizer Fittings

Heavy Duty Pantry Slides 20″ allow you to build an interior for an existing tall cabinet which slides out to reveal the entire contents.

20” Wide Medium Pantry Pullout includes pantry organizer baskets, frame and slides. Also comes in different heights and widths to fit different cabinet sizes.

Pantry Glide-Out Tray System, Face Frame. Here’s a fitting for face-frame cabinets which so many people have, instead of the flat Euro-style cabinets. While the picture shows pots in a base cabinet, these pull-out shelves would work well as a pantry organizer too.

Free-standing Pantry Cupboards

This Pantry Storage Cabinet is 15.6 x 20 x 48″ and has a decorative styled door and wood top. It’s great for a small space or a location where it’s going to be in sight from more decorative areas of the house.

White Deluxe Pantry has four doors and multiple shelves to help your organize and access the contents easily. It’s quite large at 72″H x 24″W x 14 3/4″D, with wood accents and a white melamine finish for easy cleaning.

Here’s an interestingly different pantry: the Thin Man Pantry Cabinet is an unenclosed rack which fits into a narrow space in your kitchen (beside the fridge shown here) and rolls in and out on wheels. While it gives you a lot of extra storage in a small space, it might be a hassle keeping the contents clean – or you could build an enclosure for it.

This Pantry with Wooden Double Doors is the most decorative in our list, looking more like a living room armoire than a kitchen pantry, although at 30 1/4 x 14 1/2 x 48″h it’s rather smaller than it looks.

Explore this website for more home organization tools.

More on Organizing and Designing Kitchens:

Kitchen Layouts and Floor Plans
Galley Kitchens
Green Kitchens Blog
Kitchen Layouts Blog
Custom Kitchen Islands lens
Kitchen Recycling Bins