Thrive Life has a pretty nifty line of products designed to Organize your pantry.  I’ve heard that these pantry organizers/can racks were actually the very first Thrive Life products, before we even had food!  There are entire larger (freestanding) shelving systems intended to hold primarily #10 cans (like Thrive Life’s Family cans) and the smaller Thrive Life Pantry cans like you see above, with a bit of storage at the top for soup-sized cans.

(By the way, these are part of the Spring Sale April 19-23, and they’re all at least 45% off their regular prices.)

Then there are these smaller organizers meant to go in or on existing cupboards or shelving.  Because they’re designed with flexibility in mind, these require some assembly, so let me show you what it looked like putting mine together.  It comes as an assortment of pieces like this:

It looks like kind of a lot of parts, but there are really just two pieces, with multiple “copies” of each.  There’s the larger “track” piece, and the long narrow pieces the tracks attach to.  You start with those.  Choose any two, and put them end-to-end.

See how they’re designed to interlock?  So lift the one and place it atop the other like so:

And then press it down firmly into place.

For the particular rack I’m assembling, I needed four of these pairs.

Now, put two of these pairs face-to-face.

I want to quickly take a moment to point something out.  See how there are not “clean” ends on these; they just end in the same kind of connectors?  This is purposeful.  It doesn’t matter which two you put together; they all work.  And you can put as many of these end-to-end as you need to for your space.  You don’t necessarily have to stop at two.  (Although there’s a good chance you’ll want more pieces if you’re going longer.)

Okay, now take the first of the track pieces and put it into the set of holes closest to the end, pressing it firmly into place.  (Make sure it’s right-side up!  The tracks won’t work right if you put them in upside-down.)

Now figure out how far down you need the next one, based on your can size, and press it into place, as well.  (Pardon the stuff in the background.  I was assembling this on the floor.)

This was the fiddliest bit of the process for me.  There’s a little bit of wiggle room for most cans, where you can make the fit really tight, or a bit looser, and still have the cans rest properly on the tracks.  And trying to get in everything I wanted to put in here had me taking this off and reattaching them a few times to figure out the spacing.  (At the end of this post, I’ll tell you how mine are spaced, to give you a head-start if your cans are the same size as mine.)

I also noticed that the one spot you can’t attach a track is right on the “seam” of the side rails.  At one point I had to swap my rows around and recalculate because I was ending up needing one right there.

From here, you just continue spacing and placing your racks until you’re all the way across, and then use the remaining side rails across the top to hold them in place.

(If you had more pieces, you could create another row on top of this.)

Okay, I promised you I’d share the spacing I used here.  My cans are in here pretty snugly for the most part, because I wanted to be able to squeeze all four of those rows in.  What I’m going to give you is the number of empty holes between the ones the tracks are in.  So these numbers don’t count the ones the tracks actually insert into.  (Hopefully that makes sense.)

For the pantry can: 19
For the soup can: 14
For the tomato sauce can (8-oz): 10
For the bean cans: 15