Effective fridge and freezer organisation tips to save both time and money

The fridge and freezer are two of the most hardworking appliances in the kitchen, but we may not be getting the most out of them.

Turns out the UK chucks away 9.5 million tonnes of food a year. While carefully planning meals can help reduce waste (as well as save money), knowing what's in your fridge and your freezer and how to correctly store it can also contribute significantly.

Those long-forgotten items languishing at the back of your fridge could be costing you hundreds, with new estimates suggesting the average British family is wasting approximately £800 worth of edible food a year. Bread, bananas and milk top the bill of most binned items.

It's a similar story when it comes to the freezer, with experts from the charity Wrap estimating that having a more efficiently stocked freezer could save households about £730 a year in food waste.

How to effectively organise your fridge and freezer

Make the most of the freezer space you have

Organising your freezer will make it much easier to know what food you have, saving you both time and money.

Cleaning influencer Laura Mountford recommends keeping similar items together, which makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.

As an example she has an upright freezer with drawers and organises it as follows:

• Top drawers - Frozen desserts, frozen fruit and veg, frozen ready meals

• Bottom drawers - Frozen raw meat and fish (these should not be on the same shelves as non-meat items)

"If you have a chest freezer it can be more difficult to organise so I recommend dividing the freezer up into sections using baskets or dividers to make it much easier to keep control of what items you have and make it easier to find them," Mountford adds.

Avoid stuffing things in wherever there's a gap

Organising your food stuffs in the right way could help it last longer. This could be as simple as keeping food with the fastest approaching use-by-date closest to the front of the fridge, or labelling the items you put in the freezer according to the date you froze it.

Don’t store fruit and veg together

Many fruit, such as bananas, avocados, apples, melons and peaches, produce ethylene gas, which acts like a ripening hormone and can speed up the ripening process of other foods.

Know the fridge shelf code

Try following this Good Housekeeping guide on how best to store food in your fridge:

• Top shelf - Foods that don’t need cooking, e.g. pre-cooked meats and leftovers

• Middle shelf - All dairy products: Milk, cheese, yoghurt and butter

• Lower shelf - Wrapped raw meat and fish. Placing these on the bottom shelf also minimises the risk of cross-contamination.

• Drawers - Vegetables, salads and fruit should be stored in their original packaging in the salad drawer where they will be enclosed.

• Door shelves - This is the warmest area of the fridge and most susceptible to temperature fluctuations. Store foods that have natural preservatives here, such as condiments, jams and juice, but not milk.

Don't overfill your fridge

Leaving space allows air to circulate and maintains the set temperature.

"If your fridge is looking full, take out items that don't need to be chilled, such as unopened soft drinks or bread," advises the Food Standards Agency. "This will make room for the items that do need to be chilled for safety reasons, such as raw, ready-to-eat and cooked food."

Make sure your fridge is at the right temperature

Your fridge should be 5°C or below. The FSA recommends checking your fridge is cold enough using a fridge thermometer. "The dials on fridges don't always show you the right temperature," it advises.

Keep an inventory of the items you have in both your fridge and freezer

Mountford says this will make it easier when meal planning and writing a shopping list so you avoid repeat buying things you already have to help cut food waste.

Get your storage right

Mountford says it is important to ensure items are in sealed airtight containers or bags to prevent leakages and stop bacteria spreading.

"Label them clearly so that it is easy to identify what is in the package and include the date so that you know when it was stored," she adds.

Know the freeze-for rule

According to Mountford items can be stored in a freezer for 3-6 months and after this although they will still be safe to eat, the quality is likely to deteriorate over time.