The Clever Reason You Need A Shoe Hanger For Your Pantry

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If there's one kitchen feature that distinguishes an exceptional home cook besides high-quality ingredients, it's an organized pantry. Not only is organization trendy — just ask the creators of all those strangely hypnotic ASMR kitchen restocking clips on TikTok — but it makes good sense in more than one way. In a neat pantry, not only will you find everything you are looking for, but you can easily rotate your stock by what's approaching expiration and keep visual tabs on your essentials when you are preparing food for a winter storm. Sure, you can buy all the aesthetic shelving and bins that your budget can handle, but there always seem to be random bits and bobs that mess up your decluttering mojo. What's the perfect solution? It's hiding in your bedroom closet: a shoe hanger.

Speaking of TikTok, we're really focused on a reel that shows an uber-organized pantry with a shoe hanger on the back of the door. Each pocket contains odds and ends that would otherwise get in the way: sleeves of saltines, individual packets of grits or popcorn, hot chocolate pouches (along with some ingredients you might use to level them up), open bags of granola or dried fruit, and even stray sachets of instant yeast. Without a shoe hanger and its attendant see-through compartments, all these miscellaneous items would all too easily clutter up drawers or shelves, constantly threatening to spill or topple. Pantry organization, however, should be both pretty and functional. The shoe hanger gives you both.

When we really get thinking about the benefits of a shoe organizer in the pantry to stash food in a tidy way, we can't help but think about parents and guardians of small kids. Enterprising parents could use a shoe hanger — or maybe only the lower rows of one? — to stock with pre-portioned snacks that little hands can grab on their own. We're picturing individual servings of mini rice cakes, fruit snacks, squeezable fruit pouches, or even Oreo cookies like the new chocolate-covered pretzel flavor. No matter if you buy pre-portioned servings or dole out a big bag into little resealable baggies, you can curate a selection of approved snacks that kids can munch on during the day.

Whether you aspire to your own slice of the organizational social media pie and want a Pinterest-worthy pantry, or are simply sick of not being able to locate what you need in the kitchen, don't discount a shoe hanger with clear compartments like this Amazon Basics 24-pocket model. They are cheap, don't take up much room, and can only improve your cooking experience by taking a storage dead zone (your pantry door) and making it useful. Plus, what's the worst-case scenario? If you absolutely hate your show hanger as a new kitchen addition, you can always repurpose it the traditional way as a method of getting your sneakers and high heels off the closet floor.