Best fridge organisers for families

Everyone wants the perfect Instagram-worthy fridge with everything neatly labeled and decanted. But fridge organisation can be time consuming and expensive, especially when you’ve got a family to consider.

Thankfully, you don’t need to start from scratch. There are a lot of great organisational products out there specifically designed to help you get the most out of your cold storage. We’ve scoured the market for the best of the bunch to save you even more time on your fridge organisation journey.

Best fridge organisers at a glance:

• Under shelf fridge drawer: Joseph Joseph ​​FridgeStore Under-shelf Storage Drawer, £18
• Roll out fridge drawer: YouCopia RollOut Fridge Drawer, £29.99
• Rotating organiser: Joseph Joseph FridgeStore Rotating Organiser, £20
• Fruit organiser: The Home Edit & iDesign Berry Fridge Bin, Small, £11.99
• Vegetable organiser: The Home Edit & iDesign Vegetable Bin, £14.40
• Large stackable fridge bin: The Home Edit & iDesign Divided Fridge Bin, £14
• Stackable fridge bin set: Kichly Stackable Fridge Organisers, £19.49
• Reusable bags: Russbe Reusable Freezer Bags – Pack of 8, £13.49
• Tupperware: 5 Lakeland Rectangular Nestable Storage Containers, £9.99

What to consider when organising your fridge

Type of food – Your fridge might be packed with organic snacks and smoothie packets for packed lunches. Maybe you’ve got a toddler who loves slices of fruit or grapes. The most important thing to consider when organising your fridge is your own specific needs.

Space/size – Always measure the drawers or shelves of your fridge before buying storage, they differ hugely and this can affect your choice

Temperature – It's important to know what foods need to be stored at what temperatures to keep them fresh for longer. Usually, the back is the coldest part of your fridge so you might want to consider storing items that need the coolest temperatures near the back, and buying your storage items with this in mind.

To make it easier to find exactly what suits your needs, we've grouped the different kinds of organisation products together and highlighted our pick for each category.

• Jump to fridge drawers
• Jump to rotating organisers
• Jump to fruit and veg storage
• Jump to stackable storage bins
• Jump to meal prep and leftovers storage

Fridge Drawers

The chances are, your fridge probably already comes with at least one drawer built in. Usually, these drawers are large, come at the bottom of the fridge and are often used to store fruit and veg. The problem is, large drawers are the perfect place to lose produce in your fridge making it harder to retrieve and more likely to go off. That’s why we’d suggest looking at fridge pull outs or drawer organisers that attach to the underside of the shelves in your fridge to maximise the space.

1. Joseph Joseph ​​FridgeStore Under-shelf Storage Drawer, £18

Joseph Joseph recently launched an entire range of fridge organisation products, with this drawer being a fantastic option for storing everything from meat to vegetables. The size will help you ensure that nothing gets forgotten and will make it easy to retrieve food when you're ready to cook a family meal.

The beauty of this under-shelf storage drawer is that it comes with suction cups and hooks that will fit most shelves, helping you to make the most of the vertical space in your fridge.

Available from: Amazon and Joseph Joseph

2. YouCopia RollOut Fridge Drawer, £29.99

This RollOut Fridge Drawer is the perfect multipurpose space saving solution. Depending on your family's needs, you could use this drawer to give you easy access to everything from fruit to canned drinks.

We mentioned the chaos of the bottom drawer in a fridge earlier but the effects of not being able to see what you have in your fridge on meal times can be massive. Something as simple as a pull-out drawer with two dividers can help you to better organise your food to make sure nothing gets wasted, saving you money, time and space.

Available from: Lakeland

Rotating Organisers

Few things take up more space in a fridge than condiments. On top of space, digging through copious glass jars and bottles to reach the ketchup at the back can be unsafe in a family home. That’s why we’d suggest including a rotating organiser in your fridge. They make accessing products further back in your fridge easy and safe and can help minimise the space taken up by unwieldy mayo jars or sauce bottles.

3. Joseph Joseph FridgeStore Rotating Organiser, £20

The squared off front of this organiser from Joseph Joseph, unlike other options on the market, lines up perfectly with the edge of your fridge shelves to take up less space.

The tiered design also ensures that everything is visible at a glance so you'll always know exactly what you have in stock and where everything is.

Available from: Amazon and Joseph Joseph

Fruit and Veg Storage

Fresh fruit like grapes and berries can be a great snack for your children. The problem is, the punnets they come in are plastic and aren’t very durable often leading to your grapes and berries getting crushed or spoiling. The same can be said for veg, which often comes either loose or in plastic bags. Thankfully, there are a bunch of great options for storing fruit and veg, some of which even include features like built in colanders to make preparing your produce easier.

4. The Home Edit & iDesign Berry Fridge Bin, Small, £11.99

This clear plastic Berry Fridge Bin from The Home Edit is a great way of storing berries and grapes and ensuring that they’re easy to access when you need to make a packed lunch or afternoon snack.

It also comes with a removable flow through insert that helps keep your berries and grapes away from moisture and doubles up as a colander for easy preparation.

The iDesign system is also modular, meaning that this bin will stack nicely with the other size bins in the range allowing you to slot them satisfyingly into your new, Pinterest-worthy, fridge.

Available from: John Lewis

5. The Home Edit & iDesign Vegetable Bin, £14.40

Vegetable drawers are great until that carrot trapped beneath a mound of lettuce and tomatoes starts to go mouldy. This iDesign Vegetable Bin from The Home Edit is a great way to store your vegetables and ensure that you can see what you have available to use for your next meal.

We’d suggest using one or two of these, depending on the size of your family, as they come with a built-in colander you can use to make prepping your veg more efficient.

Available from: John Lewis

Stackable Storage Bins

What makes organising your fridge such a daunting task is that a lot of the food you store in your fridge doesn’t fit well together. This can mean that even the most well intentioned fridge organisation system can quickly descend into chaos. By using stackable bins to store everything from meat to yogurts for your child's lunchbox you can make the most of all the space in your fridge and ensure that everything has its place.

6. The Home Edit & iDesign Divided Fridge Bin, £14

If you have to make packed lunches for your children, the chances are you’ve got a fridge full of yogurts, small snacks and smoothies. This fridge bin from The Home Edit is perfect for storing those larger, inconveniently shaped items to help you get the most out of your cold storage.

This particular bin includes a divider to help you better sort your food. Two or three of these organisers stacked together can help you store those unwieldy items more easily.

Available from: John Lewis

7. Kichly Stackable Fridge Organisers, £19.49

If you’re looking for simplicity when tidying your fridge, an organiser set like this one from Kichly might work well. This set of 8 containers comes in a range of sizes and is designed to stack neatly together in order to maximise space in your fridge.

These containers are multipurpose, which can be both a good and a bad thing. Of course, multipurpose organisers can store a range of food and drink. It can also mean you may have more trouble fitting your items into these containers as they’re not designed for a specific purpose. However, for the price, these are a great option to get started with fridge organisation.

Available from: Amazon

Meal Prep and Leftovers Storage

Making use of leftovers and prepping meals can be a huge time saver for your family meals. The problem is, these leftovers aren’t always easy to fit into the fridge. We’d suggest saving some space in the fridge, half a shelf should do, to store any prepared meals or leftovers you might have throughout the week. Thankfully, there are some great products to help make storing these even easier for you.

8. Russbe Reusable Freezer Bags – Pack of 8, £13.49

Sandwich bags are a must have in any family kitchen. However, traditional plastic bags are single use making them costly and terrible for the environment.

We’d suggest looking at these reusable freezer bags from Russbe instead. They come in a pack of 8 with a range of sizes and can be cleaned in the dishwasher to save you time.

Available from: Lakeland

9. Lakeland Rectangular Nestable Storage Containers, £9.99

These nestable storage containers are perfect for prepared meals and leftovers. They’re low cost and come with a leakproof, airtight and lockable lid that will keep your food fresh for longer.

Saving space in your fridge for containers like these can also be great if you’re preparing family meals for the week ahead.

Available from: Lakeland

Pic credit: Product websites

Read more:

• 10 of the best fridge freezers for families
• Annabel Karmel's mini meatballs with apple
• When to introduce cow's milk