Stretch Your Dollar: Keep your groceries from going bad longer

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — It’s national cooking day and in the spirit of saving money at home, its important to know how to keep groceries from going bad in your fridge. We are stretching your dollar with the best way to organize your refrigerator.

When getting home from the supermarket, it’s tempting to quickly put away your groceries. According to Consumer Reports, Daniel Wroclawski, how you organize your refrigerator matters..

“It’s absolutely worth just spending a few more minutes, putting things in the right places to really maximize the life of your your food and really save you money,” said Wroclawski.

Wroclawski said each section of your fridge has varying climate conditions. For example, in temperature performance tests they noticed the door usually gets a few degrees warmer than other areas.

He advises storing things like butter, condiments, juice, soda, water and even cooking oils there.

“So we really advise people to not use it to store things like milk and eggs, even though it’s really tempting because they have dedicated compartments for those items in the door. But don’t put your milk and eggs there,” said Wroclawski.

There’s also the crisper drawers.

“Many crisper drawers have humidity controls that you can either switch them to high humidity or low humidity. But even if your your refrigerator doesn’t have those adjustments, you still want to think about separating your high humidity items and your low humidity items,” said Wroclawski.

Low humidity items include apples, avocados, grapes, mushrooms, and peppers. Keep those separate from high humidity items like broccoli, carrots, green onions, and leafy greens.

The lower shelf usually located in the middle of the refrigerator tends to be much cooler. Wroclawski recommends storing more temperature sensitive items there like milk, eggs, raw meat, and fish.

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