You Should Keep Some Pants Hangers in Your Pantry — Here’s Why

Lauren Masur
Lauren Masur
Lauren was the Groceries Editor for Kitchn.
updated Sep 13, 2019
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Credit: Joe Lingeman/Kitchn

If your pantry is anything like mine, it’s stuffed to the brim with half-open bags of Pipcorn and Lesser Evil Egg White Curls and Popchips Veggie Crisps and Hippeas Chickpea Puffs and Nestlé Unicorn Morsels and Purely Elizabeth granola and Trader Joe’s dried mango, and … you get the idea. The actual contents of my pantry are a rotating cast of characters, and on any given day, there are five to 10 different bags that need careful stacking, lest they all fall over every time one of my roommates takes just one thing.

But what if I told you the answer to organizing your pantry snacks, once and for all, might already be hanging in your closet? That’s right — pants hangers could be the solution to an extremely cluttered pantry! How? Like so …

Credit: Joe Lingeman/Kitchn

Pants hangers are even smarter than bag clips. Because, even if every bag has a chip clip, you still have the problem of free-floating snack bags, that you have to rummage through to find what you’re looking for.

If you hang your snack bags on pants hangers, dangling from wire shelves, they are nicely lined up, easily identifiable, and still super fresh. It’s also great because, if your chips are suspended in the air, you have more space to store other things underneath the bags on the actual shelf part. (Of course, the caveat here is that you really do need wire shelves in order to make this work.)

Credit: Joe Lingeman/Kitchn

Like a lot of pantry hacks, I learned this one from the smarties over at Pinterest and I couldn’t wait to try it out for myself. My conclusion: I was beyond impressed at how streamlined my pants-hanger pantry looked and how easily navigable the new space turned out.

Do you have any super smart tips for organizing a pantry? Share them in the comments below!