Do you decant?
Picture an organized kitchen. Does the image in your mind include a pantry full of matching, neatly labeled containers? For a lot of people, the answer is yes. In fact, shelter magazines and Pinterest are filled with photos of pantries and cabinets stacked with uniform, beautifully labeled canisters.
When I see these pictures, two things happen. First, my heart goes pitter-patter. Everything looks so neat and pretty. Those images really appeal to my love of order and my dislike of visual clutter.
Then I think, Whoa, that’s a lot of work!
There are pros and cons to decanting kitchen staples and other items. Here are few.
Pros
It looks good
There’s no denying the beauty of a closet or cabinet filled with nice containers. Storing items in their original packaging, even if they’re well organized, certainly looks more jumbled. And a lot of packaging is just plain unattractive. Plus, using your own containers offers opportunities for fun or pretty labels, which you might enjoy creating. For many people, the visual appeal of matching or attractive containers is a great motivator to keep things organized.
It’s easy to see when supplies are running low
If you use clear containers, it takes only a glance to see when you need to restock the contents.
It can save money because you can buy in bulk
It’s often cheaper to buy supplies in bulk and to decant into smaller containers as you need them. (Of course, you might need to pay for those containers.)
It uses space more efficiently
By keeping items in containers sized to fit your storage areas, you are often able to make better use of your space.
It keeps items fresher and protects them from pests
Transferring foods into airtight containers can help them last longer and will defend them from insects or other pests.
Cons
It’s more work
It takes extra time and effort to fill and refill containers, then reseal and store (or dispose of) the original packages. You also need to decide what to do when items run low. Do you wait till you use every last bit? (And then possibly have to refill immediately, because you don’t have enough for your recipe?) Or pour fresh supplies over the old ones? Or transfer the old stuff to a bowl, pour in the new, then dump the old on top? You’ll need to wash your containers periodically too.
It takes extra room
If you buy in bulk, or even if you have regular-sized packages that you’re waiting to transfer to containers, you’ll need extra space to store the original packages. For smaller kitchens or homes, this can be an issue.
It can be expensive
Although you may save money by buying bulk goods, you may need to spend money on new containers. You might be able to reuse some old containers, but it’s likely you’ll need to purchase at least some—and possibly a lot—especially if a coordinated look is important to you.
You lose the instructions from the packaging
If you decant a product with complicated or unfamiliar instructions, you won’t have them handy. (A solution is to cut off the instructions from the box and tape them to your container, or tuck them inside, although that creates more work.)
It can be challenging if you don’t always buy the same types of food or the same sizes
Decanting can get complicated if you vary the types of items you buy from week to week. You’ll either need a lot of containers or a lot of room.
What I do
You’ve probably already guessed: for me, decanting is seldom worth the effort. I don’t care what the insides of my pantries or cabinets look like, since the doors are always shut. I stock a couple of kinds of clips to keep packages closed, so my food stays fresh. If I lived in a different climate, I might be more worried about pests, but so far we haven’t had that issue.
When do I decant? Aesthetics do matter to me if the objects are out in the open, and I find labels visually jarring. So I do transfer dish soap, hand soap, hand sanitizer, and the baking soda I keep at my kitchen sink. (I mostly use old containers whose labels I’ve removed.)
I also decant sugar and flour to make scooping them quicker. I love how easy it is to level my measuring cups right over my own containers, which I chose because they have nice wide openings. And I’ve found that borax and oxygen bleach tend to clump up in their original packaging, so I decant those as well.
As with all things organizing, this is a personal choice. Do what works for you. If pretty containers make you happy, fill your cabinets with them. If it seems like too much of a bother, then don’t decant.
Do you keep decanting to a minimum, or do you do it a lot? Which items do you transfer to new containers, and which do you leave as is? I would love to hear how you handle this issue!
My mom only decants flour and salt. I decant things like pasta, rice, flour, muesli etc. About 20 years ago one of my friends worked as a Tupperware consultant. She got me hooked on their stackable containers. They don’t make my heart go pitter-patter any longer but they are very practical and a good fit in our pull out pantry.
I remember Aby’s pantry reveal in the Kitchen workshop. Loved those clear canisters and lazy susans.
I guess my preference is indeed to decant most of our goods. I do indeed cut out the directions and simply store them inside the container. As for the old bits and refilling, we usually have a backup in our backup pantry, use the old but together with the first serving of the new bit.
Just thinking… I think containerizing standard packaging might work nicely too. Fewer loose containers so less cluttered to the eye.
Oh, and this back up pantry is like a half cellar, under the stairs, going partly under the hallway floor. That’s where we keep bulk items.
I use wide mouth Mason jars – three different sizes. I also have plastic
Oops, got interrupted…so, I also bought the white plastic lids which make it easier to get into the jar. The jar sizes are 1.5 pints, quart, half gallon. All wide mouth jars and I have a Freshsaver suction thingy. And I have a label maker, so the lids have labels that I can see at a glance.
I started because of pantry moths and I started small and gradually increased the storage. I am lucky in that I have a small kitchen pantry with pull out shelves by the cooking area and a larger pantry elsewhere.
My basic plan is buy something, i.e. red beans, and then fill up the kitchen jar then fill up the larger pantry jar and vacuum seal it. When I use up the pantry jar, it gets washed and refilled. I usually spend one hour a month refilling jars and inventorying what I need. When the large jars start getting low, then the item goes on the shopping list. I worked this plan long enough that I’ve kept notes on index cards in an old recipe file box. Cooking instructions are reduced to one serving so it’s easy to ramp up to 5, 6 or 10 servings. I know that so many boxes or bags will fill up the larger size jar. Pulling the card means that I need to start thinking about restocking the item.
I am lucky to have the space to have this staggered storage as well as the time to do the restocking, I am also flexible enough to substitute similar items until the original item is restocked.
An advantage to this system is when things go on sale – I buy extras, put it in the jars at the correct amount (i.e. for bread recipes) and it is easy to use and know when to restock.
I try to buy as much from bulk bins as possible. So I’m not technically decanting, but I do have a lot in jars. Luckily, I can usually go directly from the bulk bin into the jars I use for storage. It is a pain when you’re *almost* done with something and you have to store that little bit in another jar. But I like to try to avoid packaging.
I love to decant – and just got jars from IKEA for Christmas. I dumped my plastic-containers (they looked alike, but I don’t want to have our food in plastic any longer plus they were cheap ones and therefore, the lids weren’t absolutely tight which had caused some pest-problems in the past) and now everything is in glass. It’s more work, yes, but to be honest I enjoy filling my pretty containers and writing labels, it’s kind of relaxing to me… Storing the back-up is a problem, though because our kitchen is very small and we don’t have a pantry. I am constantly re-arranging things to optimize our cupboard-space. ;->
It’s so interesting to read how people handle this issue. Evi (and others): if you like your pretty containers and labels, I say, go for it! Sharonus, I agree with you on the packaging–my method sometimes uses more than buying in bulk, which has always bothered me, but on the other hand I’ve found that for a lot of items I might otherwise have bought in bulk I just can’t seem to get through them quick enough to justify the big packages. I know that buying from the bulk bins is different, though, since you can control the quantities. My store has limited items I can purchase that way, so I guess I am able to (somewhat) avoid that dilemma.
I have been decanting for about 4 years now and I wouldn’t do it any other way. I use the various sizes of Mason jars and my Foodsaver. My husband started me in this and I had my reservations. I love it though. I can even store fresh veges in the jars, vacuum them with the attachment, put them in the fridge and they last so much longer. I find I waste as lot less because I can see what I have in my closet. Things don’t get hidden. We use the labels that wash off very easily. If I have less of an item I just put it in a smaller jar. Mason jars can then be put in the dishwasher and sanitized. I haven’t had any problems with the moths that tended to procreate in my cupboards in grains that I had in the original packages. I cut out the instructions on the box and put them in the jar with the product I am storing. So easy to keep up with. Extra food I store down in a small pantry and seal or vacuum the product in the original packaging. This way it lasts a long time in storage. It has saved us a lot of money over the last 5 years and we have eaten better as well.