The Reason Coffee Grounds Can Help Deodorize Your Fridge

Unless you're already excelling at living a zero-waste lifestyle, it might be hard to believe that the liquidy sludgy mess that your coffee maker leaves behind in the name of used coffee grounds can actually be put to good use. Aside from being an excellent addition to your skincare routine, coffee grounds can be repurposed in the kitchen too, especially if your fridge is starting to have a suspiciously odd smell that refuses to go away.

Refrigerators tend to get a funky odor pretty quickly. It could happen because of out-of-date foods, stale leftovers, or simply because there are too many meal prep containers all with strong smells that clash with each other and make your fridge smell like a hundred different things at once. Using coffee grounds is a great trick to deodorizing your fridge, getting rid of weird smells, and keep it smelling fresh at all times. The Kitchn says that the reason coffee grounds work as great deodorizers is that they contain nitrogen which is a chemical that naturally neutralizes odors.

To deodorize your fridge with used coffee grounds, The Kitchn recommends drying out the wet grounds on a baking tray first. Once they're slightly dry, put the grounds in an open container and place the container in your fridge. The site suggests using a Mason jar with holes poked on its lid to avoid any unnecessary coffee ground spills in your fridge. Lifehacker goes on to explain that as the coffee fully dries in the moist temperature of the fridge, your fridge will start smelling more like coffee and less like stale leftovers.

However, Serious Eats warns that while this is a game-changing trick for getting rid of weird smells in your fridge, it's best to remember that just as bad food can make your whole fridge smell bad, so will coffee grounds make everything in your fridge smell like coffee. While getting a strong whiff of coffee every time you open your fridge may sound like a win-win, you might not appreciate it so much when your butter, milk, and orange juice start smelling like coffee too! This means that coffee grounds may do a good job of deodorizing your fridge by getting rid of bad smells and make everything smell like coffee instead however, if you're hoping for a trick that will make sure your fridge has no strong smells at all, coffee or otherwise, you might just want to resort to the good ol' trick of cleaning out your fridge every few months.