We live in a 100 year old farmhouse we have spent years renovating. It is small and has a wonderful large kitchen, but with limited storage. Off the kitchen is a lean-to pantry that serves as both a utility room and pantry. The pantry part consists of two facing industrial shelving units, with what was an empty wall between them. One shelving unit is used to store most of our food supplies – including a lot of store bought canned goods.

We go through a lot of canned food basics as we have 5 kids and 20+ grandkids who visit frequently and get fed well by my wife (who is an excellent cook). We have always found it challenging if not impossible to keep these shelves of food organized, easily accessible, and rotated (especially the canned foods). In addition, shelf space is at a premium and difficult effectively utilize.

We did extensive searching for a solution to this problem, thinking there had to be something out there. What we found was a lot of pictures of homemade wooden can racks, as well as a few plans to build them ourselves.

I’m a fairly handy guy so I thought I’d give it a try. I spent a few days in my wood shop experimenting and attempting to make a system myself. This didn’t go all that well, as what I made was bulky, heavy, and took up a lot of space for the relatively few cans it would hold. In addition, it just didn’t look that great.

Being a design engineer and having owned a metal working machine shop, I knew there had to be a better way, something that addresses the issues mentioned above. I started by sketching and then prototyping initial designs using scissors, cardboard, and duct tape quite literally. Once I had the basics figured out I engaged a precision sheet metal fabricator to work with me. After going through a number of design iterations (with some excellent ideas and feed back from my wife), we finally had a device that was perfect for our needs. I even went to the extent of designing and building a custom wood cabinet to mount on our unused wall and mount them in – with additional storage on the cabinet doors.

The result – A can storage system that is sturdy, modular, functional, and attractive that we absolutely love! It holds more cans than we ever dreamed of, uses very little space, looks amazing, and frees up a lot of shelf space.