We were talking about kitchen stuff, and darned if we couldn’t figure out what the third canister was for. Flour, sugar, and ???
I feel the fool.
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Salt
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Tea
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I don’t know if you are referring to specific cannisters , but I was curious. Why do cannisters come in threes. Turns out they also come in fours, but here’s some labeled ones.
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Bourbon!
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Your question sent me looking for vintage kitchen canisters online. Flour, sugar, coffee, and tea were common. Also a canister for grease.
Then I remembered that the aluminum canister set in my grandmother’s kitchen included a canister for grease. Though I seem to remember she used it for something different, which I can’t recall.
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We had a grease container always but it wasn’t part of our canister set. That’s why I remember the tea container because it never held tea (or anything) in our house. 
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At my house it would be salt, sugar, and a vat of soy sauce or oyster sauce.
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Tea or coffee. The usual graduated-in-size, largest-to-smallest, when it was four canisters were:
Flour, Sugar, coffee, tea.
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I have a white canister with a blue windmill design that belonged to my grandmother. It says Rice on it, but she used it for something else. I can’t remember what the others in the set said. Maybe coffee and tea?
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There are only two canisters in my set–flour and sugar.
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I seem to recall flour, sugar, and cocoa. (Wooden canisters in different sizes, but unlabeled–the ingredients would be in plastic bags inside the canisters.). My parents didn’t drink coffee, and when I was growing up only drank prebagged tea.
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Rice? Pretty sure my mom had a rice canister.
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I have always had a rice cannister. But it’s Tupperware.
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Lol, for me, I deal with rice in giant buckets, so a canister wouldn’t do. My family, growing up, had recycled a giant cylindrical tub from a restaurant to hold 50 lb bags of rice (or 2-25 lb bags). I still buy 10-15lb bags for myself.
Tea would be good 3rd option but that’s a big canister for one type of tea leaves.
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My mother and grandmother both used a coffee can.
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I don’t deal with rice in 50 lb. buckets, but I DO buy rice in the large brown natural fiber bags (10-12 lbs?), or very rarely, what’s in the bags at BJ’s Wholesale Club - which I think might be 20 lb. bags.
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I use a large 15 oz. cat food can that gets tucked only a shelf in the freezer after pouring off the grease from whatever I’m cooking. When it’s full, I top it with a tight cover of foil and into the trash bin on trash day.
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Admiring your avatar! 
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Back in the day, a lot of people didn’t have a big selection of tea in their house, and the canister would store Lipton’s tea bags as easily as loose tea.
We didn’t have a canister set. My mother used an old Nyafat can for sugar, and a fancy Dutch cookie tin for tea bags. (There’s one just like it in the movie FIREFLY.)
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