Freezer Inventory

A few weeks ago I finally came to the conclusion that my freezers had gotten the best of me.  There was no telling what was in them, and my “freezer memory” was becoming rather unreliable.  Once upon a time I had a freezer inventory of sorts, which worked but, I didn’t stick with it.  I knew I needed to change it up.

We are blessed to have ample amount of freezer space.  This has really proven priceless when it comes to storing our harvests, as well as being able to take full advantage of meat sales, and extra bursts of productivity during baking days and Once and Month Cooking Days.  Currently we have the freezer with our refrigerator, a chest deep freezer, and an upright deep freeze that we just purchased in December.  I wanted to keep the things we used the most in the refrigerator freezer, and consolidate the 2 deep freezers, if possible, for our upcoming beef purchase.

To start, I emptied everything out of our upright freezer, which is our biggest.  Since it was a recent purchase, it really wasn’t in that bad of shape, I just needed to know what was in it.  As I put things back into the freezer, I wrote them down on a sheet of notebook paper.  Then I moved on to the chest freezer, which is located outside in our make-shift pantry.  I carried everything inside, and tallied it up on notebook paper as I placed it in the upright freezer.   I put off my refrigerator freezer, because I knew there was a lot of cleaning that needed to be done!  So glad to finally have accomplished it, though!  I did the same process for it, as I did the others.  Except, I left basically only breakfast and lunch items in it, as well as our ice packs.  Everything else went into our upright freezer.

Once I was done emptying out and reorganizing all of our freezers, I decided to make an Excel Spreadsheet of the contents.  I broke the items up into main categories which included:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Baked Goods
• Pork
• Beef/Venison
• Poultry
• Fish/Seafood
• Meals
• Potato Products
• Miscellaneous

Under the main categories, I listed specific products such as diced green peppers, roasted green peppers, hamburger, hamburger patties.  I got as specific as I could so that I knew at a glance exactly what I had, instead of having to open up my freezer and figure it out.  Next to the specific item I wrote how many of it there was.  I thought I was done at this point, but I decided to go back and include the location in which said item was located. For the upright freezer, I mentioned the shelf it was on, the drawer, or the door.  For the other 2 freezers, I just put Kitchen or Outside, I figured that was specific enough.

This is a look at my complete inventory.

And this one is just a closer look.

Once my list was completely finished, I printed it off and placed in on the front of my upright freezer.  There is space after the last column to mark when something is taken out of the freezer.  There is also room at the bottom of my inventory list for when I add something in.  When the list gets too busy with tallies and marks, it’s time to print out a revised, more current version.

I cannot even believe how much food I had stashed away in my freezers!  Seeing it first hand, written out in front of me has been a real eye opener for me and my husband. I’m continually amazed at how blessed we really are!  It is also amazing to realize that other than our big beef purchase, which obviously broke the grocery budget for the time being, everything else was purchased out of our regular monthly grocery budget of $300!

This freezer inventory is really working for me!