Storing your food correctly could save you £9.84 a week
If you're fed up with good food gone bad, go back to basics and find out how to store each food item so it lasts.
Whatever you do, don't just cram all your food into the fridge - you’d be surprised how many food items do better out than in. Taking time to learn how to keep your food fresher for longer could cut your food waste by as much as 41%. For a family of four works out as a saving of about £9.84 a week.
Tip 5
Take the time to check where your food is best stored when you put your shopping away.
Invest in airtight containers to keep things fresher for longer.
Get into the habit of freezing food if it’s about to go out of date.
Task
- Check the Love Food Hate Waste Food Storage A-Z next time you put your food shopping away for guidance on individual items.
- Check your fridge temperature to make sure it’s set to between 0-5°C to help food last longer.
- Keep fruit in the fridge so it stays fresher for longer. Be careful if you’re an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ person. You could end up wasting more food if it’s not out where you can see it.
- Try putting a day’s worth of fruit out in a bowl where it’s visible and top it up from the fridge when it runs out.
- Use airtight containers, bags, or clips to store dried goods like pasta, rice, flour, and cereal so it stays fresher for longer. Charity shops often have bargain food storage buys.
- Create an ‘eat me first shelf’ by storing food items nearing their expiry date at the front of your fridge where you can easily see them.
Tools
- Check out the FREE Food Storage A-Z from Love Food Hate Waste.
- Find out all you need to know about ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ labels.
- Find out about 7 unexpected foods you can freeze and how to freeze them.
Keep going!
You’ve made 5 out of 8 changes on your Food for thought journey.
Make all 8 changes to save up to £83 a month.
How storing food incorrectly creates waste
UK households throw away 1.96 kg of food each day on average, which is roughly the weight of:
- a chihuahua
- a full shopping bag of groceries
- a brick
That 1.96 kg a day adds up to 8 meals a week being binned at a cost of £9.84 a week for a family of 4. That’s £1,000 over an entire year.
The Waste and Resources Action Programme says the main reasons people bin so much food are:
- Not knowing if foods are best stored in or out of the fridge.
- Forgetting about food ‘hidden’ out of sight and out of mind behind the fridge door.
- Leaving cut fruit and veg and opened packets and tins of food exposed to the air instead of storing them in airtight containers.
- Mistaking ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ for the ‘use by’ date, rather than relying on their eyes and sense of smell.