Summary: Learn how to organize vitamins & supplements without a headache.  See storage ideas from around the web, and read my simple sorting method along with a few extra tips and tricks.

Growling, I tipped up the 23rd consecutive bottle to check the label.  At least I think it was the 23rd; I’d lost count.  Several bottles tumbled off the sideboard and rolled across the floor.  A third bottle of vitamin C.  The liver pills I’ve already looked at several times.  And a bottle of fish oil that expired before my middle schooler learned to talk.

It’s no secret that vitamins and supplements present quite a challenge to organization.  There’s no standard bottle size or shape — and you can’t just decant them into something else like you can with flour and baking soda, because you need the labeling and such intact.  Moreover, most vitamins & herbs have multiple purposes, so even sorting them can be tricky!  And some of them belong in the fridge or freezer.  So…how can you organize vitamins and supplements without wanting to pull all your hair out?

How to Organize Vitamins & Supplements: Containers

If you poke around the web enough, you’ll see that people have used a variety of container-izing options for storing vitamins & supplements.

Chris at Just a Girl used plastic drawers for most of her meds.
Kate at House Mix used a bread box to conceal her everyday vitamins on the countertop.
Spice storage can also work well, like lazy Susans and pull-down spice racks.  But these are often on the small side.

Sterilite 3 Storage Drawer Organizer*Natural Bamboo Roll Top Bread BoxRubbermaid Pull Down Spice Rack, White

*If you buy this somewhere else, be sure you don’t accidentally buy the mini one, which is too small to be useful for this.

I personally prefer to have something the vitamin bottles can stand up in, which is open so I can see it, so I esssentially want baskets or trays that function like drawers.  What I ended up buying was these baskets and, although I haven’t gotten around to it yet (because everything is always a work in progress!), I plan to make some shelves in the style shown below that will fit them just right without leaving a lot of unused space.  (Premade structured shelves would be my preference, but it’s too difficult finding them in the right dimensions to make the best use of the space.)

Hommp White Plastic Storage Basket Tray, 6-Pack LgBAMFOX Hanging Wall Shelves

This will account for everything except what needs to go in the refrigerator, so if you need to, you might want to grab a narrow drawer organizer basket or something to corral the ones in the fridge so they don’t get separated.  (We only keep a couple in the fridge, so they just go in the door and they’re fine.)

How to Organize Vitamins & Supplements: Sorting

Now we get to the hard part — which I’m going to simplify for you.  The one tricky thing here is that I can’t tell you how many containers you need, or what size.  I can tell you what I needed, but you might not have the same distribution of supplement types that I do.  So I’ll tell you how I figured it out when we get to that point, but that’s really the hardest part.

Okay, so…these are the categories I used:

• water-soluble vitamins – B vitamins, vitamin C, elderberry & similar immune supplements (These aren’t actually vitamins, but there was so much overlap between the immune supplements and vitamin C that it made the most sense to keep them together.)
• fat-soluble vitamins – vitamins A, D, E, K (also fish oils, omegas, DHA, sunflower lecithin, etc.)
• minerals – calcium, magnesium, lithium, zinc, etc.  (I also keep homeopathic cell calts here.)
• amino acids & proteins – amino acid blends; liver capsules/tablets; individual amino acids like tyrosine, glutamine, etc.
• women’s & urinary health – cranberry and/or d-Mannose, More Milk Plus, etc.
• probiotics
• other tummy stuff – digestive enzymes (including lactase supplements), activated charcoal (not a supplement, but we keep it in the same place), bitters, fiber supplements
• sleep & mood – adrenal supplements, adaptogens, sleep blends, anxiety blends
• multivitamins
• everything else

I pulled out all of our supplements from the various places they’d been stashed, into a large space for working in.  I then sorted them into groups (as indicated by the list above).  Once they’re all grouped, you can see how much space you need for a given category.  I can’t show you all my categories, because the lighting in my workspace made most of them blurry, but here are a couple examples of groupings:

You might be able to discern that I actually started out by subdividing them even further.  This is largely because I was still figuring out what I had.  If  you’re happy with my categories, you don’t need to do this.  If you’re not sure about my categories, then sort yours however you need to, group together whatever makes sense, and get a visual idea of what container size you need for each one.

For us, each of the listed categories comfortably fills one full basket, except the women’s/urinary, sleep/mood, multis, and “everything else” categories, which each take up about half.  (I planned to buy the same brand’s “mini” baskets to nest inside a couple of my larger baskets, to subdivide them, but they’re out of stock, so I’m hoping they come back in stock, or I might have to get a little creative.)

You could definitely combine the probiotic and digestive categories if you have few enough items.  They make plenty of sense as a single group; I just had too many for a single basket.  And depending on who lives with you, you might not need a whole category for multivitamins.  Because we have a mix of ages, genders, and so forth, most of us take different multivitamins, so we have a good handful.  If you only have one or two, I’d probably either put them with the water-soluble vitamins or the “everything else.”  But whatever makes sense to you, because that’s how you’ll find them!

One of the things I like about these baskets is that the sides are high enough to keep things from falling out, but they’re low enough I can actually see the sides of most of the bottles okay.  If that is not the case for you, then label the tops of the bottles.  Most you should be able to just write on with a Sharpie.  A few might have darker tops and need a label (or a metallic Sharpie).

One more note: Since this is our supplements, it does not, by and large, contain remedies.  My single loose herbs are stored elsewhere.  I don’t personally use homeopathy much, but my homeopathic remedies are stored elsewhere.  Our few conventional meds and our first aid supplies are elsewhere.  The distinction here, although slightly fuzzy in a few areas, makes sense in my head but it’s not easy to put into words, so hopefully it makes some sense to you (enough that you can follow this post).

Organizing the Daily Vitamins & Supplements

There’s one more thing, though: what about the supplements you take every day (or almost daily)?  You have a couple of options, and it’s up to you what will work better.  How many things you take, how many different people in your house take things, how much that leaves that no one is taking every day will all probably contribute to what is logical for you.

You can separate the daily supplements from everything else in their own basket.  For us, that has the potential to get confusing, because there are some things we take in low doses regularly, which someone might need in higher doses for an acute problem, and then people can’t find it because it’s not in the “right” category.  (Of course, another option would be to have duplicates of those things and keep them in both places.)  The other option is to mark them clearly on the top, preferably with color-coding so it’s easily seen, so you can pick them out quickly from among the rest.

You could put a large-ish sticker on the lid and write on it.  (Probably a 1-inch round sticker like you might see at a yard sale.)  Or…you can do what MaryBeth did and buy these tiny ones.

Pack of 3300 1/4-inch labels

These are tiny — 1/4 inch — so you likely aren’t going to be writing on them.  (Maybe a single letter or number.)  But they’re great for coding.  The way MaryBeth did it was to use one dot to represent one pill, so if she needed to take two pills, she’d use two dots.  And then if she was to take them multiple times a day, she made multiple groups of dots.

I think this has the potential to get confusing if there is a time slot when you don’t take something (how do you represent the blank?), so I would probably use a different color to represent each time of day.  For instance, orange is breakfast, green is lunch, pink is dinner, blue is bedtime.

You can even color-code these to a pill sorter.

Or, if you have multiple people who are taking things, you could assign a different color to each person. That gets a little trickier, then, with designating dosage, but you can probably find a good combination that works for you.

And here’s a tip: if you’re replacing the bottle with another identical bottle, keep the old lid when you open the new bottle.  Then you don’t have to relabel it.  Since the lid doesn’t contain any of the important information from the manufacturer, it doesn’t matter if you swap the lids.

Before & After

Before I did this, my vitamins basically looked like this:

They were falling all over each other.  I could never find what I needed.  I wasn’t ever quite certain what I had, so I’d buy more of something I already had (but didn’t realize I had), and then later end up throwing away full bottles of things that were long-expired because I couldn’t find them when we needed them.  (Pardon the cheese sauce someone seems to have splattered on the dining room wall. )

Now, they look like this.  (This is not all of them, as I’m sure you can tell if you did the math.  I still don’t have all the baskets in one place because I’m waiting on the shelves I mentioned.)  They are so much more functional!