How to Deep Clean Your Freezer

INSIDE: How to Deep Clean Your Freezer in 30 minutes with our step-by-step guide. Learn to prevent food waste, eliminate odors, and save money!

Need to clean out your freezer? Come join our journey.

Let me start by saying, neglecting your freezer can cost you lots of money.

I read this incredible article the other day (yes, I know where it is from…..I chose to ignore that and just value the contents) that made me rethink my fridge and freezer. It also led to restarting the weekly meal planning. This post helped me out so much but I couldn’t follow it exactly, as I have picky eaters and these meals will not get eaten in my house.

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My goal here is not only to reorganize the freezer but also take inventory. What do I have that needs to be used before I buy anything else?

Let’s get started

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REMOVE

Because these are FROZEN items, they usually should stay frozen…right?

To assist me in keeping things frozen I got out one of our Yeti coolers, although I had to promise not to “ruin” it.

PURGE

While you are removing items, look at what you are touching. Do you remember when you put it in there? Does it have freezer burn already? Was it left open? Will you eat it?

Do you want to know what I found in my freezer? A plastic dish of snow….or at least I was told and it was saved from our last snow “storm.” This would have been 2-ish years ago….shows you how often I go through this mess.

I threw away so much food, I wanted to cry! Expired veggies, meat, and ice cream. But I was able to see what I could use AND NEEDED to use!

INVENTORY

Anything you need or want to throw out, place on your “not” shopping list.

Make a list of what you kept, so you can use it in your meal planning.

Try using this list to help you along.

CLEAN

Once everything is removed, I recommend turning up the temperature on the freezer. It will be easier to clean the shelves, drawers, and walls once the ice has been removed.

This made me realize a few things – I really don’t like the wire shelves in here, but the seem to stay cleaner than the actually shelves. AND I hate where the ice maker is located. Oh well, can’t change that.

ORGANIZE

Yes, yes…..we all know…..it’s my favorite part.

Most important part of this process is to keep like things together.

THINK: Meats, Veggies, fruits, desserts together.

I’m not sure about you but this is one place I will take food out of it’s original packaging. Meat comes packaged in those Styrofoam/plastic wraps, this is not going to protect it from freezing temperatures.

However, I am not going to buy 100 plastic containers to use in the freezer. Instead, I use freezer safe Ziplock bags! Some of the bonuses to this method are getting all the air out, flatten out bags, puncture proof, and expandable bottoms. You can also write dates and names on them.

Can’t figure out how to organize these flat bags? Check this out.

I used the above container to sort meats – pork together, beef together.

And because I have those pesky wire shelves, this helped keep everything on a shelf without sliding through.

Ready to see the AFTERS??

This will help us know what we have on hand and hopefully not order things we don’t need.

For our freezer, it makes more sense to put the veggies on the door. Some of the boxed items also ended up on the door to make room for bigger things in the main compartment.

Here are the side by side before and afters: