Clean Out Your Pantry and Ditch These 10 Items ASAP

Cluttered pantries, whether consisting of shallow shelves or butler-style pantry deep drawers, can easily lose items, resulting in wasted space and expired goods. To help keep your pantry organized and efficient, take note of ten items that may be taking up unnecessary room and need to be disposed of. This guide will assist you in identifying commonly overlooked culprits to declutter your space and avoid wasting food and money.

1. Expired Items

Expired foods can be easy to overlook when you're organizing in a hurry. While some pantry staples, like honey, have seemingly indefinite expiration dates, your non-perishables won't be edible after a certain time.

When decluttering, take a quick glance at the “best by” date printed on the packaging and, if it’s just around the corner, incorporate the item into one of your next meals. If you decant dried goods (such as sugars and pasta) to save space in a small pantry, add a label notating the expiration date to the back or bottom of the storage container to eliminate the guesswork.

2. Unwanted—But Not Expired—Items

If your kids insisted on the bulk-sized box of granola bars but now claim not to like the taste, don’t let them go to waste. As you go through the pantry, put aside items that have not expired yet but will not be eaten in time. Use the same strategy with things you bought multiples of and can’t use up before they go bad. Drop any sealed items off at a local food pantry or charity food drive so you can clear the clutter and do good at the same time.

3. Stale Items

Just because a food hasn’t technically expired doesn’t mean it’s palatable. Toss less-than-fresh cereal, chips, and crackers. Consider turning stale bread into breadcrumbs, stuffing, or croutons—but check for moldy slices first. Going forward, decant items into air-tight containers or store some things (like bread) in the fridge or freezer to avoid spoiling prematurely.

4. Anything Questionable

When going through the pantry, you’ll likely come across a few mysterious items. This could be something you sealed into a plastic bag, forgot about, and now aren't sure how old it is. The same goes for things without an expiration date if you can’t remember when or where you bought them. If anything looks or smells suspicious, avoid taking risks and get rid of it. As with stale items, be proactive in the future and adequately seal and label anything without original packaging.

5. Sentimental Items

It might sound strange to think of the pantry as a place to store sentimental things, but hear us out! If you’re holding onto decorative olive bottles or a fancy box of chocolates from your trip to Europe five years ago, it's time to toss them. These items are likely well past their expiration date, and if you haven’t consumed them yet, there’s probably a reason.

6. Unused Baking Supplies

Whether you’re an avid baker year-round or occasionally bake around the holidays, you probably have an assortment of baking ingredients and edible decorations. Boxes or bags of sugars, flours, and powders should all have expiration dates printed on them. But some decor, such as icing and sprinkles, might be a mystery. Sure, they can last years due to their high sugar content, but use your best judgment. If you can’t remember using the red and green nonpareils when baking Christmas cookies in the past several years, take it as a sign to toss them.

7. Old Oils, Nuts, and Spices

That fancy bottle of olive oil with herbs floating in it is most likely expired because bacteria grow quickly when fresh ingredients are present. Even if it’s a regular bottle of EVOO you bought from the store, oil can spoil long before the printed expiration date. If it smells or tastes off in any way, let it go. The same can be said for nuts because they contain high-fat levels like oil. So, a bag of chopped walnuts you used to make brownies with last winter will probably be rancid by now. In the future, consider storing nuts in the freezer to keep them fresh longer.

8. Dented Canned Goods

A small dent from dropping a can of beans isn’t a big deal. But if you see that a can has been severely damaged due to a deep dent or is bulging or leaking, it's unsafe to consume, according to the USDA. So, as you’re decluttering the pantry, inspect all sides of your collection of canned goods and toss anything suspicious.

9. Bulky Packaging

Your pantry could be unnecessarily cluttered from items stored in bulky packaging. Even if your pantry has deep shelves, large boxes and bags are still a waste of space. Instead, small bags of chips or packets of oatmeal can be transferred into an open bin, and the boxes can be broken down and recycled to reclaim precious real estate.

10. Broken Appliances

Many people store small appliances, such as the slow cooker or waffle maker, in the pantry. This is an excellent way to free up room in kitchen cabinets and keep them out of the way, especially if you don’t cook with the appliances often. However, if you’re using the pantry to stow away broken machines or tools in the hopes that you’ll get them fixed someday, that’s not the best use of space. Contact the manufacturer or retailer where you bought the appliance to inquire about the warranty or getting it repaired. At the very least, they may offer a buy-back option or have a recycling program so you can finally get it out of the pantry.