Fresh coffee has many more benefits than simply fueling your morning pick-me-up. There are all kinds of clever uses that coffee grounds can serve in your kitchen. One example is as a natural neutralizer of unpleasant smells. Keeping coffee grounds in a bowl on your countertop — either spent or fresh — will help keep the whiffs away and give your kitchen a pleasing coffee smell. That’s because caffeine contains nitrogen, an ingredient that has odor-absorbing properties. Scientists at The City College of New York discovered that it can even eliminate the smell of raw sewage waste, so you can safely bet it can handle a few unpleasant odors lurking in your kitchen.

And it’s not just the air in your kitchen that can benefit. Placing a few scoops of ground coffee in an open container inside your fridge will keep the bad smells away there, too. If you’d rather use fresh grounds than the leftovers from your morning cup, you can even make DIY coffee sachets using fine mesh bags and put them in places you’d like to deodorize. Anywhere from your pantry to kitchen cupboards and drawers, as well as other parts of the house you’d like to keep fresh. Coffee air freshener also works well in other smelly spots. For example, you can put a few scoops of coffee grounds in the bathroom as a natural odor eliminator. Aside from nitrogen, ground coffee has other properties that make it a useful household staple.

You may be surprised to learn that coffee grounds make an excellent cleaning agent. Thanks to their gritty texture and acidic content, you can use spent coffee grounds to clean dirty pots and pans. Scrub your cookware with water, dish soap, and a few tablespoons of coffee grounds, and you’ll notice that grease and sticky bits put up much less of a fight. Be sure to save an extra scoop to clean your sink and surfaces, avoiding porous marble counters, or anywhere that is prone to stains or scratches.

Other brilliant uses for coffee grounds in the kitchen

Used ground coffee will also come in handy when cleaning the grates of your oven and barbecue grill. You don’t need harsh chemicals to clean and degrease your grates, simply submerge them in a solution of warm water and coffee grounds for an hour and then scrub them clean with a sponge. Consider adding a handful of grounds to the sponge as an added exfoliant to get them extra pristine. 

And if you’re worried about pests in your kitchen, the good news is that there are a number of beasties that hate the smell of coffee, including mosquitos, ants, wasps, and fleas. So that bowlful of good-smelling coffee should help keep those guys away, too. You could even keep some coffee grounds on your patio for this reason. From natural air freshener to kitchen cleaning aid and bug repellent, a single bag of coffee comes with many benefits in your kitchen.