I used to keep my funnels in a drawer where they’d nest together like some kind of plastic matryoshka situation, and every single time I needed one, I’d have to pry apart the entire stack while cooking oil dripped onto the counter.
Here’s the thing about funnel storage: it’s one of those kitchen problems that seems trivial until you’re standing there at 11 PM trying to transfer homemade cold brew into a bottle and you can’t find the damn funnel, or you find it but it’s sticky with some mystery residue from three weeks ago, or—and this happened to me more than I want to admit—you grab what you think is a funnel but it’s actually a small colander and now there’s coffee grounds everywhere. The physics of liquid transfer haven’t changed since humans first figured out how to pour things without spilling, roughly 10,000 years ago, give or take, but somehow we’ve made the tools for it incredibly annoying to store. Funnels are wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, and they don’t stack efficiently unless they’re identical sizes, which mine never are because I keep buying new ones thinking that’ll solve the problem. It doesn’t. I’ve seen people hang them on hooks, which works until you need the one in the back and have to remove four others first, creating this domino effect of funnel chaos.
Wait—maybe the problem isn’t the funnels themselves but how we think about kitchen organization in general. We treat storage like it’s about fitting things into spaces rather than about workflow, about the actual moment when you need the tool. I guess it makes sense when you realize that most kitchen design was standardized in the 1950s when people had different cooking patterns.
The Vertical Hanging Approach That Actually Works (Sometimes, Depending On Your Cabinet Situation)
Adhesive hooks on the inside of cabinet doors seemed like a revelation when I first tried it—suddenly my funnels were visible, accessible, hanging by their stems like bats in a very organized cave. The small ones worked great. The large ones, though, those heavy-duty funnels for transferring bulk liquids or making preserves, they’d pull the adhesive hooks right off after a few weeks, usually at 2 AM with a crash that’d wake everyone up. Command strips rated for five pounds still failed because the weight distribution on a funnel is weird, all top-heavy and awkward. I switched to screw-in hooks, which solved the falling problem but created a new one: now I’d committed to a specific configuration, and if I wanted to rearrange things, I’d have holes to fill. Honestly, the best setup I found was those over-the-door organizers meant for cleaning supplies—they have deep pockets that can accomodate different funnel sizes, and the weight distributes across the whole door rather than a single point. You do have to make sure the door can still close, which is where measuring comes in, and I definately didn’t measure first.
Turns out drawer dividers can work if you store funnels horizontally.
Why Collapsible Silicone Funnels Changed Everything (Except When They Didn’t)
I remember the first time I saw a collapsible silicone funnel at a kitchen store, demonstrating how it could flatten from four inches tall to maybe half an inch, and thinking this was the answer to all my storage problems. Bought three different sizes immediately. They do collapse, that part is true, and they do save space, also true, but here’s what the demonstration didn’t show: they’re kind of annoying to actually use. The silicone is flexible, which means when you’re pouring something with any force behind it, the funnel can shift or deform slightly, and suddenly you’re spilling anyway. They’re great for careful, controlled transfers—decanting vanilla extract into a smaller bottle, filling a hip flask, that sort of thing—but for big jobs like transferring a gallon of vinegar or straining homemade stock, they’re too unstable. I still keep them, though, because for travel or small-space living, the storage benefit outweighs the functionality compromise. They live in a drawer now, flat, taking up almost no room, and I reach for them maybe 30% of the time I need a funnel. The other 70% I use the rigid plastic or stainless steel ones that I still haven’t figured out how to store properly.
The thing about kitchen tools is they accumulate based on optimism rather than actual use patterns.
Magnetic Strips and Wall-Mounted Solutions For People With Available Wall Space (Which I Barely Have)
Magnetic knife strips can hold metal funnels if you mount them low enough and the funnels have enough ferrous content, which not all stainless steel funnels do—some are made with alloys that aren’t particularly magnetic, and you don’t find this out until after you’ve installed the strip and tried to stick the funnel to it and it just slides off sadly. I’ve seen setups where people use pegboards with hooks, which gives you infinite reconfiguration options and looks very professional, very organized, very “I have my life together and my kitchen reflects that.” Requires wall space, though, and in a lot of kitchens, especially rental situations or older homes with weird layouts, you don’t have a convenient wall section that’s near where you’d actually use the funnels. My kitchen has exactly one wall space that might work, but it’s next to the stove, and I’m not sure I want plastic funnels hanging that close to heat sources for months on end. There’s also something psychologically exhausting about having all your tools visible all the time—it can feel cluttered even when it’s technically organized. I prefer the hidden storage approach, inside cabinets or drawers, which brings us back to the original problem of how to store weirdly-shaped objects efficiently.
Anyway, I’ve started keeping my most-used funnel in a pitcher.
The Drawer Divider Method Nobody Talks About Because It Seems Too Obvious (But It Works)
Horizontal funnel storage in a drawer with adjustable dividers is one of those solutions that seems too simple to actually work, but it does, mostly. You lay the funnels on their sides, stems pointing toward the back of the drawer, and use dividers to keep them from rolling into each other. The dividers need to be at least three inches tall, taller for large funnels, and you need a drawer that’s deep enough that the funnel’s opening doesn’t catch on the drawer above when you close it—I learned this by jamming a drawer and having to remove it entirely to extract a wedged funnel. The advantage is that you can see all your funnels at once when you open the drawer, and they’re easy to grab without disturbing the others. The disadvantage is that it uses a lot of drawer space for relatively few items, which is a luxury not everyone has. I’m using a drawer that used to hold pot lids, which I moved to a vertical organizer, which freed up the space, which created its own reorganization cascade that took an entire Saturday. Kitchen organization is like that—you can’t fix one thing without affecting three other things, and before you know it, you’re reconsidering your entire cabinet layout because you wanted a better place for funnels.
