I Tried This Spice Storage Trick and Transformed My Cabinet in 15 Minutes

Being organized doesn’t come to me naturally, at least when it comes to all of my drawers and cabinetry. I make regular brave attempts to declutter and organize all of my storage solutions — from my closets to my kitchen cabinetry — but my main problem is that while I always have the motivation to clear out and cull my stuff, I don’t maintain those organizing systems, and neither does my partner. So like clockwork, after cleaning out the fridge, for example, and setting up a system, in about three months we’ll be doing it again — back to square one.

I am always on the hunt for an organization system that might actually work in my home. So when I got a chance to chat with Anita Yokota, a licensed therapist turned interior designer, at an event for Brother, which is known for its smart, award-winning label makers, I was excited to get her take on kitchen organization. Yokota shared her favorite method for organizing her kitchen, and I couldn’t wait to give it a try.

As a busy mom of three, Yokota often makes the same meals all of the time to streamline the cooking process and appease multiple taste buds. That’s why she likes to organize her spices by dish, not by alphabetical order or any other organizing method. This allows her to easily grab spices she needs for dinner (whether it’s a taco or pizza night) and then put them back in their place instantly.

I’m an avid home cook, and one place that is deeply unorganized but in constant use is my spice cabinet, where I keep tiered organizers for my spices. This disorganization has led to my partner and I wasting not only our time digging through the cabinet trying to find what we need, but also our money when we accidentally buy duplicates because we didn’t see that we already owned something. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

We don’t do as many specific “meal nights” as Yokota does. We have dishes that we cook on repeat, like black pepper beef, but we also like to work new dishes into our weekly rotation, which require us to use different spices. That being said, there are a handful of spices we use a lot, no matter what we’re cooking, including garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, chili powder, paprika, oregano, thyme, and basil.

I decided to try a modified version of Yokota’s spice storage trick, where I put my most-used spices in the front of my spice rack, and then the second-most-used ones in the second tier, and so on based on usage.

I also thought that there’s simply no way that I’m going to hold myself accountable for keeping those spices in the same place, so I took out every single spice in my cabinet, shook my head at how many “doubles”’” I own (two cumins, two big bottles of instant dashi, four bottles of tajín, and somehow, two corianders, for some reason), and tried to pare down by combining spices.

Then I put the spice rack back together. But instead of going straight into organizing, I made sure to keep track of my new system by writing down the legend of my spice rack —  working from left to right, first row to last row, and then to the shelf just above it. While I mostly focused on keeping my most-used spices in the front, I also vaguely tried to organize the spices by food type. So my cloves, allspice, and cinnamon sticks are near one another, for example, as is my curry powder, garam masala, and coriander, too.

The second shelf was my spice overflow — extra liquid bottles for things like sesame oil, and where I put some jumbo spices like red pepper flakes, turmeric, and french fry seasoning from my favorite burger joint in my hometown.

Once organized, I taped the sheets to the inside of my kitchen cabinet and, voilà! I now know how much I have of everything and, in just a second, can determine exactly where a certain spice is, and even cross out a spice if we’re out of it, so when I’m writing my grocery list, I know what I need to buy and replace. And I know where to put it back when I’m done.

I’ve been using this organizing trick for over a week now, and since I cook almost daily, it’s been a good test run of the system. Off the bat, it’s made prepping my mise en place (all the ingredients I need in one place ready to use) instantly easier and faster than it was before, and it’s provided a clear guidance to both me and my partner about where we should be putting things back, so there’s no room for either of us to get annoyed if, for instance, the garlic is where the cloves should be. As an added bonus, the key makes reorganizing easily fixable, too — we no longer need to ask one another where something is supposed to go. 

The only change I’ll be making moving forward is to invest in a thin peel-and-stick whiteboard from Amazon so that the spice rack key is easier to update in a pinch. That way, I can mark when things are running low or have run out without having to eventually replace the whole piece of paper every few weeks. But I haven’t got there yet, and spices last a long time, so for now the paper method will do.

I’ve successfully played on Yokota’s spice storage trick and made something that works for me. This system holds me accountable to my big idea, which is absolutely what I need.