Who knew the old saying “a place for everything and everything in its place” would one day describe a viral social media phenomenon about refrigeration? With hyper-specific containers for everything from pickles to eggs, refrigerator-organising TikTok — also known as #fridgetok — is a particular type of #foodporn, so perfectly does it depict pristinely and immaculately stored food.
For a busy working person, maintaining this level of organisation may feel far too time-consuming and expensive. Yet, Catherine Benson, aka _catben_, an organisational TikTok content creator with 11.5 million followers, said that getting your fridge together can ultimately save you time and money in the long run.
“Spending a few minutes each week to organise your fridge [makes] it easier to find what you need and avoid buying unnecessary items,” Benson told HuffPost via email. “Use clear containers to help you see what’s inside and avoid wasting food. You can also plan your meals ahead of time and buy only what you need, reducing food waste and saving money.”
Kaeli McEwen, a home organisation content creator with 13.9 million TikTok followers, agreed, saying that keeping a super-organised fridge is only really cumbersome at the beginning.
“Once you get the main organised flow of the fridge, it’s not a busy task to keep up,” McEwen said. “Just keep putting things where they go and it adds no extra time at all!”
On TikTok, this upkeep is known as a #restock or a #refresh, wildly popular hashtags that have amassed billions of views. While the videos always show different types of foods and kitchens, one thing is generally consistent: clear stacking containers that allow you to maximise your fridge space and see all the things you have.
Rather than playing Tetris with your weekly groceries and trying to decipher if you have any carrots, McEwen says that having designated spaces for everything in your fridge lets you quickly grab ingredients as you need them. Further, being able to see everything in your fridge when you open it speeds up cooking, meal prepping, compiling a shopping list and putting fresh groceries away.
“With the containers that I use and how my fridge is organised, I find it easier to cook and plan because everything is visible and I never have to search for items,” wrote Tawnya Martin, a restock and organising TikTok creator, to HuffPost. “It is much easier to see when things are getting low and produce might be close to spoiling. Oftentimes, one of us just stands at the fridge looking in, calling out items to Alexa for our grocery list, and it never takes long.”