Tidy the Store Cupboard Challenge Day 5: Fruit, veg, breakfasts and baking

We’ve made it to Day Five of our latest Store Cupboard Challenge, and we’ve already gone through our seasonings and sauces, and carbohydrate and protein foods. That leaves us with a few more things to sort out, including the baking box, fruit and vegetables, snacks and a category I loosely refer to as ‘breakfast gubbins’. By breakfast I mean things you might keep in the cupboard for everyday morning use or in case of emergencies.

Here’s the declutter and organise:

• Check your breakfast food and drink for use-by dates and gaps in your stocks. That could include teas, coffees, oats, other breakfast cereals, longlife milk or orange juice, jam, marmalade, and whatever else you might use.
• Next, check any baking ingredients you might have: flours, sugar, syrups, yeast, flavourings, cake decorations, easybake yeast, nuts, seeds, gluten free alternatives and so on.
• Now go through any stored snacks: crisps, tortilla chips, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and other sweets.
• Finally have a look through any stored fruit and vegetables: dried fruit, tinned fruit, tinned vegetables, passata and tomato puree.
• If you want to reorganise the way you group different ingredients in your stores then do so, ideally putting your most-used foods in easily accessible areas.
• Bin anything that’s definitely gone off.
• Move older stocks to the front of your shelves to make it easier to use them up first.

You may also realise that you’re running low on certain food or drink. Remember to add it to your shopping list to make sure you don’t run short of anything.

That’s it for today, but we’ll be back tomorrow with some ideas for inventory and planning.