The “Salt and Coffee” Trick Will Get Rid of All Those Awful Fridge Smells

Sometimes your leftovers can linger in your fridge long after you’ve thrown them away. Odors left behind from pungent foods can really make going into your fridge for a can of soda or piece of fruit an unpleasant task, and these odors can even penetrate other foods in your fridge (and even make your garbage stink, too). But before you run out and buy a new box of baking soda to suck up all those bad smells, you can try this easy odor eliminating hack with products you probably already have in your pantry.

Anna Viktori on TikTok shared her go-to hack for getting rid of nasty odors in her refrigerator using nothing but salt and coffee grounds. 

“Did you know that salt and coffee can prevent unpleasant odors in your refrigerator?” Viktori wrote in her caption. Her video shows how she combines the two ingredients on a piece of tinfoil before turning it into a pouch and punching holes in it with a toothpick to let the odors get absorbed.

Coffee and salt can be used to remove odors in other areas of your home, too. You can leave coffee grounds out to dry and then put them in a container with holes in the lid. Once that’s finished, you can let the container sit out wherever you’re facing weird smells.

And the Morton Salt website actually has an entire page dedicated to odor elimination using salt. According to the site, you can pour salt directly into your garbage disposal to cut back any stink. Or, use salt and a wedge of lemon to remove odors from your hands or any porous surface like a wooden cutting board. (Adding acid while you’re cooking something like salmon, for example, helps cut back on the stink.)

You can also use vinegar as an all-purpose cleaner to get rid of fish smells as well as other unwanted smells in your house, too.

Coffee and salt may be the new best odor-eliminating hack you have in your cleaning arsenal. Give it a go and smell the difference.