I haven't had a chest freezer for years, love my upright!
But, when I did, I had the best luck putting like items in medium sized cardboard boxes (fruit, veggies, meat, poulty, fish, etc.).

Label the box, inside and out. At least then you can lift out a whole box of fruit and get it out of your way if that isn't what you're after. One thing to move instead of 20 little containers.

I use plastic bins in my upright in a similiar way. The shelves also contain certain items, each type of meat is stored together (beef, fish, chicken, veggies, and so on.

At least this way if you grab the wrong thing at least it's the same "food group"!! LOL You might have wanted broccoli and got peas but it's a veggie.

That said, I still lose stuff. And Christmas time is horrible....I don't have a designated shelf for COOKIES!!

Good luck,
Deanna

I use wire baskets such as the ones that come with chest-type freezers and Hefty Jumbo 2 1/2 gal OneZip bags to organize stuff that I vac seal. Sterilite 58 qt clear storage containers are great for stacking under the wire baskets that hang across the top of the freezer.

I use milk crates in mine. They have holes all the way around so air can circulate. They have handles that make them easy to handle and they stack well. You can easily remove one to get to whatever is in the bottom one. There is enough room left to put some things beside them.

Under the upper hang baskets, I used some 5 gallon buckets to contain veggies and other small items, and separate plastic milk crates for different meats, soups etc.

I've missed my chest freezer for around three years now. When it quit working, I bought my first and only upright. Don't think there is anyway to organize them. Darned thing will probably last forever since mistakes seem to work the longest...

I'd probably separate it into quadrants-- for me probably veggies, raw meat, dessert stuff (fruit, etc), and prepared food.

I organize my upright freezer but giving each level/shelf a number, like an elevator. #1 is the bottom, #5 the topmost shelf. Freezer wall is marked with the number.

Then we do an inventory. Using Excel to create the list, I mark it with colunms of Type (beef, pork, fish, etc) the item (salmon steak, pork chop, etc), quantity, and the level they are on. The list is dated, printed and posted both in the kitchen and on the freezer in the basement. We try to keep up with it, not always well, but at least I know to look for the steaks on shelf #3.

Do the inventory when you have to do a defrost. Mine is frost free, so I try to do it every 3 to 4 months, or when choas ensues.

pkramer -

Wow - I admire anyone that can organize like that - (sigh) -I try hard, really I do.

All of the ideas above are great - now I need to take some time and initiative to put them to good use. Not sure if I can maintain it, but with the new year coming, it might be worthwhile to give it some thought! Resolutions - you know.

Bejay

P.S. One thing comes to mind, if the manufacturers of freezer containers could come up with different colored tops - now that might be something to think about.

B.

I have a deep freeze in the garage and an upright in my kitchen, besides my refrigerator with its bottom freezer. I've decided that the 'eat it up soon' stuff should go in the refrigerator's freezer and that the upright have the meat and veggies we use most often, while the deep freeze serves as the 'backup' for overload harvest. The refig/fzr has ice cream, waffles, and fruit juices. The deep freeze has the 'overabundance' of harvested fruits and blanched veggies for long term. The one we use the most though is the upright and I do use magnets to hold up the handwritten notes that list what is on each shelf - but not HOW MUCH or WHAT is there: shelf one (starches): bread, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, cheese; shelf two (meat): beef, lamb, venison, pork, veal; shelf three (poultry): chicken, turkey, duck, pheasant, goose; shelf four (quick fixes): vegetables, soups, pot pies, pizza, pasta, quiche (this shelf gets quite full at times and so some go to the refrig/fzr for quicker consumption); shelf five (sweets): cookies, cakes, pies, jams; shelf/drawer six: fruits; Door shelves (additives): garlic, onions, chives, herbs, ginger, lemon zest, nuts, seeds, and dried tomatoes. It is not auto-defrost but I find that every June and December is just about right for clearing out and reorganizing. When I start a grocery shopping list I first look at what is in the freezer shelves. It is amazing what you forget you have hidden away in there.

Nancy

Bejay, you may be onto something. I haven't seen different colored lids (other than "over the years" they've changed).
But! You can buy different colored permanent markers.

Make your own individualized lids.
Use Red and write FRUIT in big letters.
Use Green for VEGGIES.
Black, blue, orange, gold, silver all available these days!

I mostly mark my containers using freezer tape and a fine marker. Contents, date and any specific cooking info, quantity or 'other' that might be necessary. Just a small piece of tape can hold a lot of information and I remove it before I wash them.

Let us know if you find something that works, because other than Peppi............nobody can be that organized!!

Just kidding...there's probably lots of you out there, I'm just not one. I thought I was doing pretty good to keep all the hamburger on one shelf (we get half a beef at a time).

Deanna

B, I like the coloured-top idea!

I'm really lucky to have an upright --- it was a housewarming gift --- because I KNOW I'd lose everything in a chest freezer. I can barely find the stuff in the small freezer over the fridge. (Some days I can barely find my kitchen counters.)

But even in my upright, one thing that helps me is to use different kinds of containers for different classes of things --- I don't have hard and fast rules, but I tend to put soups & stews into old yogurt containers, stocks into my tall, blue-lidded purchased containers, shredded zucchini into square Rubbermaid containers, Meats into Ziploc bags, etc. That way the shape and size of the container gives me a visual clue, like the coloured-lid idea (Rubbermaid does have several colours of lid for its containers, btw, though they're quite pricey and I couldn't afford to keep a freezerful of them; I mostly use those for fridge leftovers).

I do use something like Deanna's system for my canned goods --- I put the same kind of label on all the jars but use a different-coloured marker to label each item so that even from a distance I can hone in on the right one, and have an idea of how much salsa vs. tomato sauce vs. tomato juice is left.

Good luck!

Z

Thinking about the color-top containers... I'd probably end up needing a color that was already used up and have to use wrong-colored ones... way it always seem to work around here :) I'm wondering if colored plastic 'electrical' tape will stay put on freezer containers, though. I have 3 or 4 colors of that. We keep soups, stews, casseroles in one of fridges freezer in the basement. It is an unusual one that keeps at zero temp but its a gold-colored one that has been rattling and threatening to quit! Upright freezer is stuffed with veggies and meats. Buckets/crates don't work well in there :(

psittaceinejungle: I use a few of the plastic parts bins in my upright. I can stack the ones I have 2 deep and 2 high so that I can slide out an entire bin of stuff to see what's behind it. Keeps things from sliding around and tipping over too. I mostly use these for odd shapes and things in ziplocs that don't stack well.

I linked a site below to show the kind of bins I'm talking about.
Mine look alot like the red one on the very top. About 8-10" deep and 8" wide. They hold the small stuff; hotdogs, pint sized ziplocs, cheeses.

Deanna

Here is a link that might be useful: bins

For those of you that like to keep an inventory list, I found that if I type up a list of the things I keep on hand in the freezer and put the list in a sheet protector(that is sold in office supplies). I write in the number on packages of each product and the date on the sheet protector with a wipe off marker. That way I don't have to be constantly making up new lists. I leave room to add products and comments on my sheets. I keep the lists in a notebook that I keep on top of the freezer and check it out when I make up the grocery list before going shopping.I list different kinds of foods on different sheets in the notebook,such as meats, vegies, fruits, convenience foods and so forth. It is easy to just wipe off the number of packages of food and put in the new number when I add or subtract something.

I've tried a few times to organize the freezers and other times to keep a running inventory. However, this only works if there is cooperation from others in the household.

Our household is a bit odd. I am the primary grower/preserver of food. He is the primary cook of the daily meals. Unfortunately, he will go dig through the freezer and re-organize it to his own method which means I can never find anything in it or keep track of how much of any one thing we have without emptying the freezer and sorting it all!!!!!! Imagine my dilemma when I defrosted a bag of what sort of looked like chicken breasts when frozen but turned out to be bananas when I reached in to not find a chicken breast. Hum....... I think I got him to label things after that incident.

Electrical color code tape will sometimes stick fine to freezer containers but I've also experienced it not sticking if anything was moist when labels are applied.

Any ideas about how to put a bug in some ones ear to get them at a later date to think the freezer organizing plan was their idea?

I saw some red and green x mas color freezer contianers on sale this week

I'm no help, my 240 pounds of beef just got dumped in on top of 150+ pounds of pork, which was kind of separate from those two dozen ducks we raised. The fruit is kind of stacked at one end of the chest freezer.

I try to sort before I put in new beef every fall but this year I had H1N1 when we picked up the beef from the processor and so I just dumped it in and walked away...

Annie

In addition to marking/coding packages and compartmentalizing the inside of the freezer, hanging a dry erase marker board above the freezer might help as a quick and easy way to indicate where everything is inside.

Now granted I don't own a second freezer, all I have is the lttle one on my fridge, but at work I used paper clips to hang signs on the freezer shelves. We had to keep personal food seperate from school food. You can hang as many "signs" as you want, marking what each row of goods are.

In addition I saw that someone mentioned different colors of tape. Personally my sister and I have found purple, pink and of course gray duct tape. Can you color code them animal, vegetable and mineral??? I do know that perm marker comes off duct tape so that won't work.

One day, I too, hope to own my own freezer. A gal can dream can't she???
Good luck,
Teri
P.S. I like the idea of the check off list on the freezer, maybe held on with magnets and a grease pencil or dry erase hanging from a string... (I live alone and have no one to blame but myself)

This is a timely thread for me, since I just got a 9 cubic foot chest freezer for Xmas. Yay! Just what I asked for! (Is that weird?) The fridge in the kitchen is smaller than the average fridge, so the little freezer on top doesn't hold much. It's great that now I don't have to try to use it for any sort of long term storage and can just put stuff we're going to eat soon in there.

Right now it doesn't have much in it... just a paper grocery bag of meat, a couple of quarts of chicken broth, my frozen for long-term storage garden seeds, and some bags of bulk spices from Penzey's.

I need to work on filling that thing up, and hopefully I can do that in a somewhat organized way. Maybe I can hang a dry erase board behind it with an inventory. That way I can wipe things off as they're used.

I'm loving this thread. My freezer goes between pristine organization with accompanying list and chaos so extreme I consider just torching it and starting over.

I love the colored container idea and the colored tape. Next time a block of meat falls on my foot and I decide it's time to organize, I'm going with the tape idea.

And for the future, I'll keep my eyes open for colored containers or lids.