The Amazon Storage Unit That Reddit Users Are Obsessed With

Elizabeth Licata
Elizabeth Licata
Elizabeth Licata is a former contributor to The Kitchn.
updated May 1, 2019
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(Image credit: Lauren Kolyn)

Spend enough time looking at kitchen designs, and things start to look familiar. You start to see the same trends and products — KitchenAid stand mixers, pot rails from IKEA, and bright-pink rugs, for example — over and again. Sometimes things become popular because of a dedicated marketing team with a lot of ad dollars, but sometimes it happens on its own because a product is just that useful.

What Reddit Has to Say About This Baker’s Rack

I first saw the Whitmore Supreme Baker’s Rack several months ago in a Reddit thread about a “Bright, friendly kitchen” in Raleigh, North Carolina. The kitchen was full of plants and cute wall art, but what immediately caught my eye was the kitchen rack in the window.

It’s a simple rack with chrome wire shelving and a removable wood cutting board, and it was doing an admirable job of holding pots, pans, and a few ingredients without making the kitchen look cluttered. What really struck me was that a rack like that could hold just about anything — bar stuff, an Instant Pot, baby bottles and a bottle warmer. It’d be great for keeping potted herbs in the window, and it’d make a fantastic coffee station, too.

People always say that the key to organization is “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” And when you’re dealing with a small kitchen, oftentimes, the most valuable thing you can bring in is extra storage. We all have things in our kitchens that need to go someplace. Maybe it’s pots; maybe it’s spices, or cleaning supplies.

The baker’s rack really stood out, and multiple people in the comments said they’d been thinking about buying the same one and wanted to know if it really lived up to the hype. Fortunately, at least four other people showed up in the Reddit thread to say that they owned the exact same rack. One used it as a coffee bar, with dog bowls on the bottom. Another used it to hold a microwave and coffee pot, with coffee and tea on the top shelf and pots, pans, and cat food on the bottom. Another just said, “I just needed a shelf, and that one works great.” They all seemed to love it.

“I feel like we’re all having a very adult moment over this shelf,” one happy shelf-owner said.

Later, I typed “kitchen organization ideas” into Pinterest, and there was my old friend, the baker’s rack, again. Some held plants; some held cookbooks. And I got confirmation: It really does make a great coffee bar.

What Amazon Has to Say About This Baker’s Rack

It’s cute, it creates storage in a small kitchen, and it isn’t all that expensive, either. The Whitmore Supreme Baker’s Rack was selling on Amazon for $60 at the time — the price appears to have gone up to around $84 in the past couple months — and it has a 4.5-star rating with more than 2,900 reviews, most of which say this rack is extremely sturdy and functional in a kitchen. It can hold appliances like microwaves and stand mixers, and it doesn’t wobble, even on uneven floors. (The rack has adjustable feet, so it can stand solidly, even when the floors aren’t perfectly flat.)

A good, stable shelf and rack like this can be a game-changer in a small kitchen. I’ve had apartments where it would have doubled my storage space and made things a lot less cluttered. Heck, it would have effectively doubled the size of my entire kitchen. Not bad for an Amazon buy that’s less than $100.

What do you think? Would you buy one of these for your kitchen?