The Gadgets Page

A friend of mine purchased the Free Standing full size Harvest Shelf from Shelf Reliance and really loves it. I liked the idea of the food rotating through and not getting lost at the back of the cupboard, but I don’t have a ton of canned goods. As I researched further I found the CanSolidator and CanDensor models also by Shelf Reliance. Costco had a deal on two so I bought four, and was glad I did.

When I first put the unit together it was too small for my pantry leaving 5 inches of shelf in front and 7 inches on the side. Each bar of the unit is 10 inches long, so as long as your shelf is divisible by 10 inches wide these are great. The other issue I had with the CanSolidator was that after putting the two bars together and splitting it up for the cans (all the pieces for one shelf kit), I was one spacer short of fitting in four rows of standard size cans (the size of a Campbell’s soup can), making the unit even more of a space hog.

After trying various configurations and not liking any of them because they took up more space and held less, I ended up cutting the bars and adding an additional 7 inches to my row, which also allowed me a lot more variation in configuring for different can sizes. It’s not too hard to cut the bars apart and you can order additional pieces by the piece at ShelfReliance.com. I used my Open It! tool to cut the pieces to size. All in all it took me a half day of working and reworking the lay outs to get it right. I now have three shelves made up of most of the pieces of the four shelf kits.

I like that I know at a glance exactly how many cans I have of soup or tuna. I like that it automatically rotates my food for me so I eat the oldest stuff first. So for me it was worth the hassle of breaking it apart and putting it together the way I wanted it. This unit will take up more room and hold less than just stacking the cans on your shelves so if its space you’re worried about this might not be the best fit.