How to Organize Your Kitchen With a Built-in Food Center

Need more kitchen space? Try a built-in food center. Use this extra storage as a pantry or for a wine fridge or small fridge. It's even covered by a home warranty.

How You Can Benefit from a Built-in Food Center

If you're wanting to create more space in your kitchen by updating its fixtures and overall layout, a built-in food center is a great option to consider. In addition to making your kitchen a lot more organized and user-friendly, built-in food centers can add to your home's resale value.

Looking for some ideas on how to implement this feature? Here are a few of our favorite examples of built-in food centers.

Install a Built-In Pantry

Built-in pantries are growing in popularity and have replaced the traditional walk-in pantry in many newly constructed homes. Crafted to blend in seamlessly with your cabinetry, built-in pantries are attractive to many homeowners because of their relatively small footprint. However, they are more than capable of meeting the average family's food storage needs.

Pull-out drawers allow you to see your all your spices, canned goods, dried goods, breakfast cereals, snacks, etc. at a glance. Drawers also help solve some of the other problems associated with fixed pantry shelves, such as items getting pushed behind other items (and becoming lost in the shuffle), as well as wasted space above and below each shelf. Also, since the pantry is located in your kitchen instead of off to the side or in a separate room, cooking becomes less of a chore. All your necessary ingredients are now easily accessible.

Now that your new pantry is finished, check out this helpful article on how to stock it.

Add a Built-In Wine Cooler

If you consider yourself an oenophile, show off your love of wine and make happy hour even happier with a dedicated wine fridge. Wine is delicate and needs to be stored properly, so that it doesn’t spoil. When you choose to store bottles in a wine fridge, you can rest assured that they're being kept at the correct temperature and away from the heat and light that can alter the chemistry (and taste) of their precious contents. Plus, having quick access to your wine makes perfect sense if you entertain often, love to cook with wine or just enjoy a glass with a good meal.

A wine fridge can easily be built into your cabinetry. In fact, these built-ins are frequently found in kitchen islands or underneath kitchen counters. 

Purchase a Built-In Refrigerator

A built in refrigerator-freezer can instantly transform your kitchen from average to chef-level. This type of fridge sits flush with your cabinetry, and you can even add custom panels to make it blend in with your cabinetry's finishes.

Of course, because they are integrated with your existing kitchen décor, built-in fridges are shallower than standalone units. However, this doesn't mean you necessarily have to sacrifice any storage capacity. Just choose a wider model of built-in fridge to compensate.

Still need help? Check out this handy guide on choosing a refrigerator.

Add an Appliance Garage

Carve out a dedicated space for a much-loved, frequently used appliance like a blender or a food processor with an appliance garage. Homeowners love this amenity and value it as much as they do other kitchen upgrades such as granite countertops and state-of-art wall ovens. Appliance garages are designed to blend in seamlessly with your cabinetry but they can be built specifically to house large appliances, too. Imagine being able to give your dishwasher a facelift, or sliding your microwave out into view only whenever you need to use it. Appliance garages help make your kitchen more functional while keeping it extra-tidy.

As all the above benefits above stated, a built-in food center can be a handy appliance in your home, but when it malfunctions, you could be left with a non-working appliance and the hassle of the repair. Plus, you might experience added stress with the looming expense of  repair. But when you have American Home Shield^® , you can enjoy the convenience of a thorough repair of your built-in food center, along with other appliances around your house.