21 Creative Ideas To Organize Your Fridge Using Dollar Tree Items

Desperate for unique organization products to keep your refrigerator under control? Grab your car keys and your wallet and head straight to your local Dollar Tree branch. The boxes, baskets, trays, and holders contained within the walls of this DIYers' paradise offer near-endless creative ideas for fridge organization. Below, you'll find organization ideas ranging from using book bins and wire drying racks to store flat-packaged produce, like shredded cheese and tortillas, to using placements and chopping mats to keep shelves clean and make fridge labels. You learn how to DIY a fruit basket for your fridge door, use a vanity organizer for sachets, and store bread on a shelf riser — among many other things.

As you move through this list of ideas, one thing you might notice is that almost all the organizers use clear containers. There's a reason fridge manufacturers make all the interior fixtures transparent. Being able to see through a container in the fridge allows you to see what's inside at a glance, which aids organization and adds efficiency to your grocery shopping and at-home stock checking.

Keeping a fridge clean is really important, too. It prolongs the life of your appliance and ensures health-harming mold spores and bacteria are removed before they can contaminate your food. Only choose Dollar Store products that are either made entirely of plastic or feature a plastic coating since you can easily wipe it down. If you see, say, the plastic-coated metal dish rack you're using in a fridge drawer shows signs of deterioration like rust or a cracked finish, discard or repurpose it somewhere else (non-food related) in your home.

You're probably familiar with purpose-made drink holders for the fridge; most often, they're designed to hold cans. Bottled drinks just won't fit — Instead of trying to clumsily perch them on a can holder, store bottles upright in narrow bins. In fact, upright storage might even keep your drink fresher, longer, especially where fizzy and fermented beverages are concerned. Experts recommend vertical storage for unopened beer and opened champagne bottles, for example, for exactly this reason. Dollar Tree's Essentials Plastic Fridge Storage Bins are perfect for purpose.

Tidy fridge exterior, tidy mind. Here's an idea to keep your refrigerator surfaces organized and increase storage options in a small kitchen. Take a long, narrow Dollar Tree basket. We like the Jot Multifunctional 3-Section Wire Mesh Desk Organizers and the Essentials Gold Wire Trays, but any lightweight basket will work. Hot glue a couple of super strong magnets, like LOVIMAG Neodymium Disc Magnets with Epoxy Coating for $10, to one of the long sides of the baskets. Then, attach them to your fridge to hold lightweight items.

Wash your berries and grapes in a colander, like the top-rated OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel 5 Quart Colander for almost $28. Leave them to dry a little in the sink. Place a folded paper towel in the bottom of a few Dollar Tree Black and White Storage Trays to soak up any leftover moisture, keeping your fruit fresher longer. Before placing the grapes into the containers, snip each large bunch into lots of smaller bunches. Berries can be dumped inside (gently) as is.

Yup, we're talking about that Dollar Tree staple, the Assorted Small Book Bin, that you'd normally see in a student's locker or the bookshelf in your home office. They lock to each other side by side on a fridge shelf, meaning you can use them to store items that commonly go together in a meal, like tortillas and cheese or deli meats, salad mixes, and wraps. It will make assembling meals a more streamlined experience. Pretty much any produce that comes packaged flat is a perfect fit for these bins.

Going vertical can help you expand fridge shelf storage space dramatically. Save an empty water jug from the recycling bin and head to Dollar Tree to buy three Royal Norfolk Ceramic White Solid Glaze Dinner Plates. Cut the top off the water jug and cut two or more rings from the body. Place a ring on one plate, fill it with the food you're saving, and stack the remaining plates with rings and leftovers. The bottom of the jug covers the top plate.

Keep your fresh produce off your counter by DIYing a hanging fruit basket shelf that hooks onto the exterior of your fridge using easily removable Command hooks. Push a deep Dollar Tree Assorted Rectangle Wire Basket and a shallow Essentials Gold Wire Tray over the legs of an Essentials White Wire Cabinet Shelf. Secure them with cable ties — you can buy a pack of Nylon Cable Ties at Dollar Tree — and mount your new rack to hooks attached to the side of your fridge.

Streamline your household's school lunches and food preparation by creating sandwich-making kits inside your fridge drawers. Baskets with low sides, like the Dollar Tree Essentials Woven-Look Plastic Baskets with Handles, fit neatly into the drawers, and you can easily see what's inside each one. Fill them with cheese, sandwich loaves or rolls, lunch meats, sliced tomatoes — anything you typically put between two slices. The handles make it easy to lift the entire kit out of the fridge and take it to the kitchen counter — and vice versa.

Are you forever wondering how best to use that annoying small storage shelf at the top of your fridge door? Pop out the metal bar running across the front of the compartment and slide in a Dollar Tree Essentials Rectangular Plastic Egg Storage Container – lid and all. Replace the metal bar (this holds the container in place), lift the lid, and fill your new egg holder with eggs. Don't eat eggs? Store any small items there instead, from potatoes to condiment sachets to medicines.

One of the most common mistakes to avoid when organizing your fridge is overcrowding the top shelf. You end up losing all sorts of stuff in the back, only finding it later when it's moldy and inedible. A few Rectangular Slotted Baskets with Single-End Handles from Dollar Tree will solve this problem. The handles help you pull the basket right out so you can easily see what's at the back. Pop the baskets on your fridge shelves and fill them with like items.

Dollar Tree Cooking Concepts Flexible Chopping Mats happen to make great fridge labels. They're sturdy, waterproof, and wipeable; easily cut them down to size to slot into the front of any clear shelf, compartment, drawer, or basket in your fridge. If you own a Cricut or similar label maker, use that to print out text for your labels — design bespoke labels using Cricut Design Space, Canva, or a similar program. Or, if you change the organization of your fridge often, you could write on the plastic with a whiteboard marker.

Bread tends to get squished in the fridge. It's soft, so it's often the item that's shoved to one side when you need to squeeze that container of leftovers into a packed fridge. Solve this issue and make more space on your fridge shelves using a shelf riser like the Essentials White Wire Cabinet Shelf from Dollar Tree. It slides neatly over other food items or a storage basket or container, allowing you to use the usually empty top half of the shelf for storing bread or other fragile produce.

Because they drop down at the front, can dispensers are great for more than just holding your soda. Organizational guru and TikToker @thecraftedstudioco uses Dollar Tree Essentials Plastic Fridge Soda Can Storage Organizers to stow small, mismatched items that are hard to find a home for otherwise — think tubs of guacamole and lunch bag-sized bottled drinks. They're also great for organizing items in narrow fridges. Pro tip: Ensure they match the depth of your shelf. Any overhang might prevent your door from opening, and an overhang doesn't look very tidy.

Here's a cleaning hack that'll make your refrigerator really sparkle: line all your shelves with vinyl placements sourced cheaply from Dollar Tree. After all, what's the point of putting the effort into perfectly organizing your fridge if you can't keep the shelves clean? You could, of course, use pre-cut, purpose-made liners, but these placements work just as well, come in cute patterns, and are cheap as chips. These Home Collection Sentiment Vinyl Placemats have life-affirming phrases printed on them, while the Black Lattice-Pattern Vinyl Placemats ooze contemporary design vibes.

If you can't fit your mismatched condiment bottles into one fridge door shelf, decant each sauce and dressing into matching Dollar Tree Cooking Concepts Clear Condiment Bottles. Their uniform size means you'll be able to fit a select number of bottles neatly into any shelf — the number will, of course, depend on the size of said shelf. The downside? Depending on how many bottles fit, you might have to cut back your condiments collection to your favorites only. And don't forget to label each bottle so you know what's inside!

A clip-on basket helps you use that empty space beneath the top of each shelf. In fact, the Dollar Tree Clear Fridge Clip On Basket is purpose-designed for this use, featuring two clips extending from the top corner of a deep, colander-like basket. The transparent wall makes it easy to see what's inside at a glance, and you can pull them out from under the shelf to remove what you need when you need it. Use it to store kids' snacks, butter, eggs — whatever you use most often.

Dollar Tree has a Home Collection 3 Sectioned Clear Plastic Vanity Organizer that can be put to use corralling all those condiment sachets you get in your delivery orders. You'll no longer find them down the back of the fridge during your next clean-out with this idea! Use the individual compartments in the organizer for condiments of the same kind — one for ketchup sachets, one for mayonnaise sachets, and another for those packets of soy sauce that come with sushi. Slide it into a compartment in the fridge door.

One unexpected dollar tree item that is a game changer for fridge organization is the Cooking Concepts Clear Sponge Holder. It just so happens that these also stick to the plastic walls of your fridge. Suction one (or more) onto the side or back walls of your shelves and use them to store small, easily lose-able items like string cheese, squeeze pouches, and condiment packets. They're easily removable if you decide to re-organize your fridge at any point.

Desktop drawers don't just give you more space on a dresser or desk; they also make great use of disused vertical space in fridge shelves — with a sliding drawer, you don't have to take out the whole bin to access whatever's inside. Dollar Tree has stackable drawers in two sizes to fit any fridge: mini Essentials Clear Plastic Desktop Organizer Drawers with two drawers and the larger single Plastic Stackable Drawers. Measure your fridge before you go shopping so you know which will fit on your shelves.

Tired of rummaging through fridge drawers full of food only to find your shredded cheese crushed and lumpy at the bottom? Head to Dollar Tree and pick up one or more of their Essentials White Wire Dish Drying Racks. Use it to organize packaged produce vertically in fridge drawers — think shredded cheese, tortillas, salad mixes, bagged green beans, boxed or bagged refrigerated snacks, and more. Now, instead of the product piling one atop another, you can easily see what you have in stock between each divider.

Flat-packaged produce like cheese, deli meats, and wraps are a pain to store in the fridge. Stack them, and you can't easily see what you have. Get yourself some Assorted Translucent Plastic Pencil Boxes with Color Lids from Dollar Tree and fill them with each type of produce. Take advantage of the colored lids to create your own product code — purple for dairy, pink for meats, green for wraps, and so on. Alternatively, make grab-and-go sandwich making or meal kits to save time on meal preparation.

One of the most disorganized parts of a fridge is actually on the outside: the top. You have an opportunity here to really make a functional storage space that enhances the aesthetic of your kitchen. Install Dollar Tree Black or White Plastic Floating Shelves on the wall above your fridge, and fill the space with cute baskets — we like the Woven Straw Round Baskets, Essentials Assorted Fabric Storage Baskets with Grommets, and Rectangle Palm Print Baskets from Dollar Tree — and Dollar Tree Surefresh Reusable Plastic Cereal Containers.