I love true pullout pantries where all is reavealed with one pull .I do not think pullout shelves behind doors are ideal it takes two operations to get anything out .

Pullouts are necessarily expensive at $1500+ for 24". And they invariably use up valuable counter space better used for work zones. Shallow shelves behind doors or behind doors with 6" bins are budget friendly. They give you more instant access over pulling out a shelf both for loading and retrieving stuff. Open two 30" doors and you see everything.

I have 12" shelves in my pantry, but would prefer 15"

Maybe my use is different than how most people use their pantry???

I use a lot of the space for storing various flours, pastas, rice, snacks, dry ingredients or mixes, a few boxes of cereal, back supply of condiments, pickles, paper plates, napkins, paper towels, foil, parchment, wax paper, plastic wrap. Canned goods are placed in front of one another, but I organized by product for each facing. When I get to the last can or two of something I buy more.

I store most everything in airtight containers labeled by product type. I like consistency/uniformity, and since longer pasta needs a 12" container I bought containers that were 8"x12". The handles catch on the doors if I place the on the shelf so that the 8" side is on the front so I lose 4" of space for each container.

I really don't see the need for a lot of very shallow storage.

I built my own cabinets and I chose about 12" deep, and made boxes that hung on the backs of the doors for all those little things.

The new house has about 14" or so deep for me to work with. I have yet to design them or the rest of the cabinets.

Shelf spacing was determined by items like a stack of standard cans two high, or @Jennifer Hogan plastic tubs down low. I took a tape measure to real things and have a little wiggle room.

As with all my designs it is doors down to mid-thigh and drawers below. The big tubs sit on that lowest level.

The new house cabinets I will take the time to build lighting into them. As I get older I need better light everywhere it seems.

If you have the depth, for sheer storage capacity without giving up visibility, it is hard to beat pullouts.

I had a space about 6’ W x 30” D, and wanted to use it all.

I thought pullout shelves would be super useful. They are not. Nice to have, but I tend to forget they exist.

It is easy enough to see things with pullouts, and you can store so much. The pullouts can be moved higher or lower, and it took some experimenting to find the most useful positions. I put a switched receptacle in one of the top cabinets for future in-cabinet lighting, but found that with pullouts, it doesn’t matter if the nether region of the cabinets is dark.

The depth allows a bay to be used as the much-derided appliance garage. I usually use the Robocoupe and Vitamix in the pantry, with the shelf pulled out, although I could lift them out. There is a second appliance pullout with receptacles, intended for the mixer, but I haven’t needed it so far.

In general, the stuff I store in the pantry varies a lot by girth and height - gallon jug of cooking oil, teeny can of tomato paste, tall bottle of sparkling wine, packages of noodles, loaf of bread, plastic containers of nuts and legumes, etc. Not that they wouldn’t fit on the classic shallow pantry shelves, but not as much would fit.

All these pullout slides cost money, but I saved some by doing the install and finish. Which turned out to be a pain in the butt, had to move two water supply lines, run power, cut out studs, etc. The finish was easy since I wanted the natural maple look, just applied some clear. It took time to get the dang door gaps right, and after that I ran out of energy so will have to install the pulls and trim later this year.

I have a walk in pantry. A majority of the shelves are 12 inch deep with a small section of 18. I wouldn’t want them any shallower and I do not need them deeper. I keep baking items like flours and sugars in containers in an upper cabinet.

I like the pull out shelves as well that’s great idea! I have to agree with John Liu that’s looks nice

The Roll Out Tray Shelves (ROTS) John shows are fine for things up to about chest high. Anything above, though, and the ROTS are not very useful.

Shallow cabinets/shelves like Darbuka shows are much more useful overall. Everything is visible when you open the doors - no opening/closing ROTS or rooting around trying to find something in the depths or middle of the shelf.

Years ago (circa 2008), there was a lot of discussion about this on GardenWeb's Kitchens Forum (before Houzz). The consensus was that 12"D is the "sweet" spot for pantry storage. Nothing gets lost in the "depths" and the vast majority of items fit. It's a rare item that won't fit on 12"D shelves. In my "old" house, I fit my KA bowl-lift mixer, breadmaker, waffle iron, toaster, (large) food processor, and blender on 12"D shelves. Large boxes of cereal also fit on 12"D shelves. Cans 3 or 4 deep fit, depending on the size (diameter) of the cans.

If you decant into other containers, you don't want to have to "stack" them front-to-back and not be able to see them with one sweep of your eyes.

If you cannot use shallow cabinets, then I recommend true pullouts (not ROTS) no wider than 18". The shelves are attached to the doors of the cabinet and they pullout when the door is opened. With no wider than 18", you can look at either side to see what you have without having to move things around. You can also see everything from top to bottom.

I will say, though, that if you can put in a "dry-walled" reach-in pantry, it's even better b/c you can utilize the entire space floor-to-ceiling. It's also a lot less expensive!

If I had to rate pantry storage, I would rate it as follows, best to worst:

Best:

• Dry-walled/built-in Pantry (Reach-in, Step-in, or Walk-in) with mostly 12"D shelves
• 18"W x 24"D Pullout Pantry

Meh:

• 30" to 36"W x 24"D Pantry cabinets with swing outs (but they're expensive)
• >18"W x 24"D Pantry cabinets with drawers (or ROTS) on the bottom two thirds and shelves on the top third -- along with a step ladder so you can see what you have in the top shelves. (I guess you could have ROTS in the top third with a step ladder as well. I would probably put tray storage in the top third, YMMV.)

Worst:

• Any deep pantry cabinet with stationary shelves. I have 18" & 21"W x 24"D of this type in my new house and cannot wait to get rid of them - they're useless! I left all my food in boxes b/c it's much easier to see/access it! (I already spoke to two different KDs to replace them with pullouts.)

I miss my Kitchen in the "old" house *sigh* (I designed it with a lot of help from folks on the GW Kitchens Forum in 2007!)

Pullout example:

The best way to keep a pantry organized is to have the shopping list nearby.

@John Liu I entertained the shelves at this kitchen and gave up on that for the reasons you stated. it is 6' or more from a peninsula and I pictured bags on them like that, and then realized the bags would frequently be in my way for putting things from bags to the pantry.

The new house has an island nearby.

That wall with the E on it is a bit more than 10' long. new plan is to angle a set of display doors at the right to cap off the pantry, all the way to the corner. That gives me about 9 x 9 of pantry wall.

They mention the work triangle often in kitchen design. I have a second triangle here. it is formed by the west island end, the fridge, and the pantry. Groceries land on the west end and go where they go from there.

Best: Walk-in pantry, which gives you flexibility to have deep shelves on one side for cases of paper towels, crock pots, punch bowls. Sure, shallow shelves are great, but we all have large items too. AND you can use the majority of the space for shallow shelves, though I'd rather go 10-12" rather than 2-3" -- things like cake mixes aren't going to fit well in that very small size. Best of all, a walk-in pantry allows you a view of all of your stuff in one glance, yet they are inexpensive to build.

Medium: Reach-in Pantry, which allow you all the positives of a walk-in (varied shelf size, etc. but you have less space. If you have deeper shelves, you can organize things into baskets, which are easy to pull out /keep things organized and easy to reach. And you can get access to cans /jars in the back by using lazy susans or can rollers. Since a reach-in pantry requires less square footage, it's probably the cheapest pantry to build.

Worst: Pull-out pantry cabinets. These are very expensive to build (like large kitchen cabinets), and you can't see all your stuff at once. When you pull the shelves in /out, items can fall over.

While I agree that Reach-in, Step-in, & Walk-in are the best, not everyone can put in a built-in pantry like that. Some people are "stuck" with pantry cabinets.

Personally, I don't like having to put things into bins/baskets to try and force a pantry to "work". I'm doing that right now to make-do until I can redo the pantry cabinets and I really don't like it! I still have to "stack" bins behind each other, which makes it difficult to see everything and still forces me to take out stuff to not only find things in the back but to access them. (I'm using transparent bins, but with things in them, you can't see thru them to the bins/items in the back.)

A walk in pantry would be very cool! But I think you have to have lots and lots of extra space to spare. The room has to contain not just your food, but also your entire body with room for that body to turn around, bend down, move arms around, etc. I’ve never measured the required cubic feet of empty space - maybe six coffins worth? Think about how much food you could pack into a single coffin (hopefully never have to), multiply by six. It is practically like needing two pantries to get the storage of only one.

A reach in pantry partly solves that problem. The empty space can be just enough for your arms, torso, head - if you bend low to reach something, your bum can stick out of the space. But there is a new problem, which is the door. It is say 30” wide, and standing in the doorway you can only easily reach so far to the right or to the left, which limits the accessible width. While you’re there, looking for stuff, the door is swung open, so the space outside the pantry is blocked to people trying to move through.

For a small kitchen without much extra space to spare, that gets a lot of traffic, I think pantry cabinets are the best solution. Or at least worth considering.

Looking at my space, obviously a walk in pantry is impossible.

A reach in pantry, 30” D x 6’ W, is possible, you could have a single standard door, stand in the doorway, and reach all six feet width - assuming reasonably limber, ambulatory, etc. But while you’re stretching to collect cans from the farthest corner, the open door is completely blocking movement from the foyer into the kitchen, if not banging against the door to the side entrance/basement stairs. Yeah, the reach in is cheap to build, but it doesn’t work - in this space.

I don’t know that pantry cabinets with rollouts have to be expensive. Doesn’t Ikea make some? Mine were custom made to measure and cost less than $6,000 delivered (no finishing or installation). Soft-close slides and tall boxes eliminate the “objects falling over” thing.

The bins - the thing is that dry goods like nuts, grains, legumes, pasta come in such a variety of package types and sizes, from long boxes to squat sacks, plastic bags that don’t reseal and fall over spilling nuts, 5 lb bags and you want to keep 4 lbs in the basement, etc. If you put the original packaging in your pantry, it’s an untidy mess. So you buy a set of stackable containers, decant, repackage, and label. Tidy.

Cans are easy, they have standard sizes, but I don’t have too much in cans.

Liquids are the worst, one soy sauce comes in a tall skinny bottle, another in a small fat bottle, another in a plastic jug, and same for sakes, vinegars, mirins, dressings, oils, cooking sherry/wines, etc. I haven’t resorted to decanting and repackaging liquids, but it honestly has crossed my mind. As is stands, I cannot have liquids grouped entirely by type as I’d like; I have most of them that way, then there is the pullout for too-tall bottles. Irritating!