How to Organize a Freezer to Make Meal Planning Easier

Inside freezer organization

I am going to show you what I keep in my first freezer. I have three freezers—this freezer. I have an outdoor refrigerator with a freezer, and then I also have a deep freezer. All three serve very important purposes for me. Let me show you this one first.

I work fantastic when I have bins and categories. At the top, we have miscellaneous items like popsicles, lemon, and ginger for my lemon ginger tea, frozen pumpkin puree, some Parmesan cheese left over from a party we had, and all of my frozen bread.

I just went to Trader Joe's and picked up some more corn tortillas. I like to keep those here in my inside refrigerator freezer. Whenever I want to make enchiladas or tacos, I have some tortillas there real quick to grab.

The next one is frozen veggies. Lots of frozen veggies. 

I've got some cut-up celery and frozen corn. These are tail stems. So next time I want to make some broth, I can just put these in the broth. I have frozen cauliflower and some more frozen corn. Most of the time, what goes in here is things that are already open. 

Then we have our frozen fruit. 

These are frozen plums that I froze last summer that we're going through. We've already finished all of our frozen peaches. I've got some frozen cranberries and some clementines. 

I had tomatoes from our garden last year. Some frozen mango. We have some leftover soup. This is white bean soup. It's so important that when you freeze soup, you don't freeze soup with rice or potatoes in it. It will come out gross. This white bean soup with sweet potatoes is perfect for freezing, but no white potatoes. 

Outside freezer organization

We are now out in my garage. I will say this freezer needs some TLC. I must go through it and freshen it up because it feels chaotic.

I’ve got some tomato sauce that I froze from last summer—black bean sweet potato chili. I've got lots of broth, different soups, grains, and more cashews. I think I have three of those. 

I have groats, more pumpkin puree, and Lara bars. When I go to a grocery outlet and buy stuff like this, and it's about to expire, I throw it in the freezer.

You won't see a bunch of prepackaged food in my freezer. I don't buy anything like that at the store. It's too expensive. Our grocery budget is only $600 a month. There's no way I could afford to buy all that prepackaged stuff and still feed my family healthy and on a budget. 

Deep freezer 

So what I have developed for myself are ingredients. I have certain ingredients on hand in the freezer. It's so much easier for me to pull a recipe together.

Making muffins is not hard for me. I can whip out a batch of muffins in 20 minutes. Having freezer muffins is not something that I want in my freezer because they don't get eaten at all. I would be better off buying a muffin mix, which would get eaten. 

The same goes for freezer pancakes or waffles. I can make these fast. I like to have ingredients, frozen fruit for smoothies, and frozen vegetables. I can roast frozen broccoli.

Another thing that we love to have is hash browns because I can whip out hash browns fast. Also, having frozen bread besides muffins, I love having sourdough bagels, English muffins, and sourdough bread ready to go in the freezer. 

When I'm constantly working on cycling through my freezer, it's not an issue. The only freezer that doesn't get cycled through regularly is the one that you saw in my garage. That refrigerator freezer houses a lot of the things that I preserve in the summertime that I'm slowly working myself through. 

Organizing my deep freezer

Let me show you how I organize my deep freezer. I don't use containers that can crack or break in here. 

When I'm constantly lifting them out, I use bags. 

These are grocery bags that I get at Target or Walmart. This is my best method. 

I have some frozen bread; then I have bags of frozen vegetables down here. 

These are so cheap. I think Walmart or Aldi is the lowest price for frozen vegetables. I love keeping frozen broccoli on hand. It is by far the easiest side dish for dinner.

These wild blueberries will be slightly more expensive than regular frozen blueberries at Walmart. Pay the dollar more and get the wild blueberries because they are so much healthier for you and have many more antioxidants. 

Brown rice does not store well in the house. It can go rancid pretty fast. So I keep all of my brown rice in the freezer. This bag is right here; I have popsicles. My kids love to play with neighborhood kids and eat lots of Popsicles. So I always keep popsicles on hand.  

We have a big, beautiful family meal on Saturday nights at the beginning of Sabbath; I have signed up with ButcherBox for that. 

So I will house all of our frozen meat in my deep freezer. 

How to organize a freezer

That's my freezer organization. My freezer is stocked, and I don't have to think about it. What tips do you use to keep your freezer organized? Share in the comments below.