Kitchen Tips: Organizing Your Refrigerator - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. A refrigerator should not be a mystery box that you open up and God knows what is in the back of it. You want to make sure your refrigerator is put together in a way that you can find things. You want to think about "first in, first out", meaning that if you bought something a long time ago, you are going to store it towards the front so you remember to use it before it expires. You want to think about your eggs staying in the original container, because if you use one of the egg crates that the refrigerators come with, the eggs are exposed to the air, and they can absorb other types of refrigerator flavors. You want to keep eggs in their original packaging. Think about the refrigerator not staying open very long. Every time you open and close your fridge, it is losing the chilling factor. And if you overload the refrigerator, it makes it too hard for the refrigerator and the air to circulate all the food so they stay at their optimal cold level. Putting things in the refrigerator actually helps bacteria slow down its growth, so it keeps things, food, safe. So with food safety in mind, if you are going to store raw meat or chicken, or any type of poultry or fish, you want to make sure it is going to be on this bottom level. You do not want to have any type of raw vegetables that are not going to get cooked first coming in contact with anything that is raw, like a raw protein. So that always gets stored by itself, towards the back. The back of the refrigerator is actually the coldest part of your refrigerator, so that is where it should get stored. Try and keep your vegetables together, your produce together. And then this type of drawer is great for putting butter in, and cheeses, and turkey and that kind of thing. You want to just be able to organize your refrigerator in a way that you can see everything. If you have so many items in your refrigerator, they get lost in the back, and you end up throwing them away. Keep in mind when you are shopping at a grocery store, the things that are sitting in a cold section are there for a reason. Now tomatoes, when you buy them at a grocery store, they are never in a refrigerated counter. You want to leave them out on your counter, because if a tomato goes into the refrigerator, the tomato is actually going to change the texture, and it is going to get very mealy. Same with potatoes and onions. There is too much moisture in this refrigerator for it will make the potato and the onion rot much faster, so you always want to leave those on the counter, also. There are certain fruits and vegetables, for their optimum storage, they should either be on the counter, in a dark cabinet, or they should be in your refrigerator.