Organizing Herbs & Spices

Like many people, I have run into the problem of where and how to store my herbs and spices. In the past I stored my spices in round brown glass bottles. Those are quite nice as they are cheap, you can see the current level without full exposure to sunlight and have good lids. Now when I moved abroad, a friend of mine got those bottles with the spices where they are still used to this day. Now with a more permanent kitchen I thought on getting some again. The issue? My kitchen is quite small and I'm not sure if putting up shelves for spices solves this issue or makes it even worse.

I started to look at what my options were. The first one is to keep everything in its original packaging and put it in the drawer. This works until it doesn't. You can't really find anything and some of the packaging isn't really made for resealing. Then there are spice organizers and they have three major problems, many of them are round which wastes space, they usually don't hold as many spices as I would need (30+) and they are not really stackable. Another factor is price, as these solutions are sometimes surprisingly expensive.

After not finding a good solution, I shelved this project for a while. Then I was reading How to organize your kitchen like a restaurant by Preston and was reminded that professional kitchen heavily rely those smaller plastic containers. Those fit most of my criteria: scalable, stackable and cheap. The trade-off is that they are fully transparent and not as beautiful as the glass containers. Since these are going into a kitchen drawer anyway, it's not a big issue. Looking around I found containers in the 100-500ml range that fit my use case. For example, the ones from DECA Packaging Group.

Now for the fun part: the containers are intended for commercial packaging, not home use. So you can either buy them by the box, usually 500+ units, or only for commercial entities. In the end I found a way to source them and after a few weeks of use I like the solution. Currently required herbs, spices and other ingredients are put in the top layer and drawer. The rest is in another cabinet, where it then gets swapped out mostly based on usage. Caching tiers in the kitchen, who would have thought. Have you found a good organization system for your kitchen?

By the way, for the creation of simple labels, gLables in combination with CSV input works surprisingly well.