What goes in your fridge, and what does not

Why this needs its own page

Storage and the cold chain is about temperature and what happens when it goes wrong. This one is about the actual appliance in your actual kitchen, because that is where the mistakes happen, and because half the questions members ask are not really about degrees Celsius at all. They are about where to put it so a flatmate does not move it, whether the salad drawer is fine, and what to do about a fridge shared with four other people in halls.

Benedikt's view, which we have adopted, is that this is a five-minute setup problem you solve once. Choose the spot, put a thermometer in it, put a box on it, and then never think about it again. Almost every storage disaster in our circles traces back to a supply that had no fixed home and got shuffled around by somebody looking for the leftovers.

Nothing here overrides your leaflet. Products differ, particularly on whether an in-use pen belongs in the fridge or in a drawer, and the leaflet in your box is the authority on yours.

The geography of a domestic fridge

Fridges are not one temperature. They are a small weather system, and the differences between shelves are far bigger than most people assume.

• The door. Warmest place in the fridge and the most variable, because it swings out into the room several times a day. Never store medicine here, however convenient the little rack looks.
• Against the back wall. Coldest place, often below freezing in older models and in anything set too low. This is where lost supplies go to freeze.
• Directly under the cold-air vent. Same problem, less obvious. Find the vent, then avoid the shelf beneath it.
• The salad drawer. Variable by model — humid, sometimes very cold at the base, and in most households the drawer people rummage in. Not ideal.
• Middle shelf, towards the front. The most stable real estate in most fridges, and where we would put it.

There is one genuine tension worth naming. Food-safety guidance in the UK asks you to keep a fridge at five degrees or below for food, while medicines want two to eight. Those overlap comfortably in the three-to-five range, so you do not have to choose — but a fridge set aggressively low for food can and does dip below zero at the back, which is exactly the failure mode above. A cheap thermometer sitting where the medicine sits ends the guesswork.

What goes in

Unopened pens or cartridges, in their original carton. The carton is not packaging fluff — it protects the medicine from light and it carries the batch number and expiry you will need if anything ever has to be reported or replaced.

Unopened vials of powder, if that is your format, and whatever your specific product's label says about the diluent. Reconstituted vials, clearly labelled with what they are and the date you mixed them, upright, and not in the door.

An in-use pen, if and only if your leaflet says the fridge is where it belongs during the in-use period. Several products allow a pen in use to live at room temperature for a defined number of weeks, and for some people that is genuinely more convenient. Check yours; do not copy a member with a different product.

Cool packs for travel, in the freezer rather than the fridge, ready for the day you need them.

Kate keeps hers in a lidded plastic box with her name on it, on the middle shelf, with the thermometer taped inside the lid. It cost almost nothing and it has survived two house moves and one flatmate reorganising the entire kitchen.

What does not go in, and what does not need to

Plenty of the kit around this treatment gets refrigerated for no reason, which wastes space and makes the important shelf harder to keep tidy.

• Needles, syringes, alcohol wipes. Room temperature, in a drawer. Cold needles do not sting less; cold medicine stings more.
• The sharps bin. Never in the fridge. Somewhere high, dry and out of reach of children and pets.
• Oral medicines and supplements, unless their own label says otherwise. Electrolyte sachets, protein powders, anti-nausea tablets, laxatives — all cupboard items.
• Anything in the freezer. Freezing ends a GLP-1 product permanently, and a freezer is not a safe place for a pen you are trying to rescue from a warm afternoon.
• On top of the fridge. One of the warmest surfaces in a kitchen. Members do this constantly with the spare carton.

One food-safety note, because it is real and rarely mentioned: raw meat and fish on a shelf above your medicine can drip onto the carton. A lidded box solves it, and so does putting raw items on the bottom shelf where they belong anyway.

Sharing a fridge with other people

Halls, houseshares, family homes, staff kitchens, a stay with in-laws over Christmas — a shared fridge is a privacy question as much as a temperature one, and you get to decide how much anyone knows. Telling people, or not is the fuller conversation.

Practically: an opaque lidded box with nothing written on the outside except your name solves both problems at once. Nobody moves a labelled box and nobody reads a carton through it. Members in student accommodation have had good results asking the accommodation office for a locked medicine box or a mini-fridge on medical grounds — those requests are routine, because insulin users have been making them for decades. Poppy got one in a week simply by asking, having spent a term hiding pens in a coat pocket.

If you are staying somewhere without a fridge you trust, hotel minibars are frequently not proper fridges — often a warm cabinet with a compressor that never cycles low. Ask reception for a medical fridge, which decent hotels have, or use an insulated wallet and get to a pharmacy. Travelling with a pen has the rest.

And if you live with children, the rule is the boring one: high, closed, and never left on a worktop between the injection and the tidying up.

The five-minute setup

Pick the shelf: middle, front, not the door, not the back wall, not under the vent. Put a thermometer there. Put a box there. Put your name on the box.

Use oldest stock first, which sounds obvious and is the single most common way expiry dates get missed, especially for members who stockpiled during a shortage. If you have several cartons, front-load the one that expires soonest and physically put it nearest the front.

Check the thermometer when you take your dose out, not on a schedule. It takes a second and it means a failing fridge gets caught within a week rather than within a month.

Write the expiry date of your current carton in the same note where you record your injection day and site — the two-line note we keep recommending in the diary guide. Then, genuinely, forget about it. This is meant to be a small thing that stays small.