Give every shelf one job
The most useful thing I ever did to my own fridge was to stop thinking of it as storage and start thinking of it as a small shop with departments. Top shelf: things ready to eat without cooking — yoghurts, cooked meats, cheese, that half-melon. Middle: dairy and eggs. Bottom: raw proteins. Drawers: produce. Door: jars and bottles.
Then carve out one shelf-end as the eat-me-first zone, and keep it at eye level rather than tucked away. Everything with a short runway goes there: the opened cream, the heel of the sourdough-adjacent loaf, last night's rice. When someone opens the door hungry at nine o'clock, that is the first thing they see. In my house it has quietly cut the amount we throw away more than any clever container ever did.
Drawers, and the produce problem
Crisper drawers work because they trap humidity, which keeps leaves crisp and stops herbs collapsing. The trouble is they also hide things completely. Two habits help. First, decant: get salad and herbs out of the supermarket bag and into a box lined with a dry tea towel, which absorbs the condensation that turns leaves to slime. Second, keep one drawer shallow — don't stack. If a drawer is more than two layers deep, the bottom layer is already lost to you.
Also worth knowing: some things simply do not want to be in there. Tomatoes go mealy and flavourless when chilled. Potatoes, onions and whole garlic prefer a dark cupboard. Unripe avocados and stone fruit need a day or two on the counter before they earn a shelf.
