The Food Storage Blog

Back in the old days, I used to love getting into a good ole’ Facebook (or forums before that) row. Nowadays, it makes me sick to my stomach. As a father, I try to give good advice to my daughters; a consequence has been I try to take any advice that I give them (ugg!). Kindness, forgiveness, sharing, compassion etc. I really struggled with that last night.=)

I basically had a Facebook person telling me that I was lying when I said you could store food long term in 5 mil bags, and that I was a horrendous person trying to kill people because I had too many 5 mil bags on hand I couldn’t get rid of. Of course, most of us know you can store food in 5 mil bags because we’ve done it; I even have food from 2007 still stored in 3.5 mil and 4.3 mil bags. These products have been around for decades, and if they DIDN’T work, we’d know it. The Internets would be full of stories of failed bags and ruined food. And yeah, occasionally one of those stories pop up, and the culprit is usually user error. I had my own share of failures back almost 20 years ago when I first started and I didn’t know what I didn’t know; but again, that was on me, and not on the products involved. The good news is we also see the stories about folks opening up their Y2K food in 4.3 mil bags and its all still awesome.

So today, I’m going to break down the argument that there is something intrinsically better about a 7 mil bag that makes it so superior that 5 mil bags should never be used. You can find lots of this info in our video here, I’m just going to go into a bit more detail in this post.

Let me start with some premises:

1: Yes, the best 7 mil bags will be better than the best 5 mil bags. I think this is where some of this argument stems from. A good manufacturer of bags cares about both their products and the materials they are made from, and so our 7 mil bags are ‘better’ than our 5 mil bags from a technical standpoint, because there’s more quality material there. As examples, we add Nylon for tensile strength, we use real Mylar because its inherently stronger than the materials people replace it with. These things make a difference, and the testing shows it.

However, here’s the rub. Just because the 7 mil bag is ‘better’ by a few percentage points doesn’t mean its going to keep your food fresh any longer, because the amount of oxygen and moisture getting to your food is so small due to the incredible barrier properties of the primary barrier layer, which isn’t actually Mylar…its aluminum foil.

The harder truth for some folks to realize is that there are some 5 mil bags that are measurably better on some performance indicators than some 7 mil bags, depending on who is making the bag. It’s like how you can have a $25,000 automobile with better acceleration than a $40,000 automobile.

2: Aluminum foil – The best Mylar bags (4.3 mil and up usually) on the market use a .00035″ layer of aluminum foil (some also use a thinner .000285″ layer). It’s a common laminate, and used in all kinds of things, from reflective insulation to metallic tape. And in perfect condition, it has zero oxygen and zero moisture pass-through. This is the main reason why 5 mil bags have nearly identical barrier properties to 7 mil bags…they are both starting from a base of zero. Now, there is a measurement regarding the aluminum foil layer, ‘pinholes per meter squared’, and this is why when in actual use Mylar bags don’t have perfect scores when it comes to oxygen and moisture penetration. Both in the manufacturing process, as well as in the process of storing food, it has and can develop tiny pinholes. In many places on the Internet, you can see people freaking out about pinholes…but they are just part of the process, and they are inevitable. And this is why your Mylar bags have several other layers that are NOT prone to pinholes.

3: Other Layers – In our case, our 5 mil bags are made of 5 total layers, and our 7 mil bags have 7 total layers. We are the only Mylar bag seller we know still using Mylar as one of those layers. So why Mylar? It has good barrier qualities, exceptional tensile and mechanical strength and is very easy to work with. Others replace Mylar with lower-performing materials because it is expensive. LLDPE, the most common replacement for Mylar used by some of our competitors, is up to 500 times worse (yes, the numbers can be crazy) on OTR (Oxygen transmission) and up to 10 times worse on WVTR (Water vapor transmission) than actual BoPet. Our 7 mil bags (and now our Steelpak 4 mil bags) have a Nylon layer. Why? Because it too offers added puncture protection.

Most sellers sell 3-4 layer bags because they are cheaper to produce and offer sufficient protection for many uses. The good part for them is that a thick bag feels like a thick bag, however its made, which is why when you ask ‘what’s your favorite Mylar bag’ you get so many answers, because they all FEEL good and sturdy, and most folks think that correlates to being made from quality materials. However, ask other producers what their bags are made of, and WHY, and you’ll likely be greeted by blank stares. Most other sellers are white labelers, meaning they create an e-commerce business around selling a product that’s profitable. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But they are not Flexible Packaging companies, of which Discount Mylar Bags is the only one specializing in food storage packaging solutions. Even though most folks know us as Discount Mylar Bags, our official name is ShieldPro Flexible Packaging, because we design packaging solutions for both the retail and corporate marketplace. Our customers range from the Department of Defense, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, multiple university research labs (One which said our bags tested better for pharmaceuticals than some products designed for it), multiple food and supplement companies, the USAF (to protect parts from corrosion) and hundreds of others.

4: The Science – I know, I am very skeptical of that term as well. However, in this case, it is just the measurement of how products perform. I’m not even going to use the fancy OTR/WVTR numbers (though you are welcome to email me about them)…I’m going to break it down even further. So how much oxygen does a Mylar bag let through each year?

For a quality 5 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .22cc/year.

For a quality 7 mil 1.25 quart bag, the answer is .19cc/year.

Both of those numbers are ridiculously low. If you are using a 300cc oxygen absorber from us, with around an 1100cc actual rating, and you assume 300cc of that capacity is used when you first seal the bag, you will have enough oxygen absorption for another 3,636 years with a 5 mil bag, and another 4,210 years with a 7 mil bag. So yes, that 7 mil bag will do better for you if you are an Egyptian pharaoh, but not so much if you’re a rural mom or dad like me.=) Of course, your food will break down long before you open the bag, but at least there still won’t be any oxygen in it a couple of centuries from now.

The numbers for moisture are actually closer than they are for Oxygen, and are essentially a rounding error, with no measurable improvement in MVTR between 5 and 7 mil and between .19 and .22cc/year.

So assuming you are using good bags, and good oxygen absorbers, you will get exactly the same results (unless you live 4000 years) using 5 mil bags instead of 7 mil.

I know this post and others like it can make folks feel a little weird. After all, the ‘Internet’ tells me to only use 7 mil bags! And the Internet is never wrong, right?

5: Yes, it feels WEIRD to think a great thick bag isn’t protecting your food much better than a thinner one, but it is true. Take a look at the below chart; these are various types of films used in various products. Please note the HUGE variations in these numbers, a difference by a factor of over 100,000 between some of the products. What films you use in manufacturing matters. However, please note that EVERY one of these films has its place, depending on the application. Some have a better melting point, some are easier to laminate, some bind better to aluminum or another material, etc. But the statement made to me last night, that a 5mil bag CAN’T ever be used to store food long term and that I must be trying to kill people by selling them, is just a statement made from a lack of information.

One type of plastic at 2 mil might not be able to hold up a 12oz cup of coffee, while another 2 mil film of a different plastic might hold up a brick. That’s how big a variation there can be. A plastic bag you put in your fridge might have an oxygen pass-through rate of 1000cc/day. A better one that is lighter than the first might have an OTR rate of 100cc/day, just through the use of different materials.

So if you’ve had a bad experience with a particular bag, please don’t make the assumption that every other product like it will also be bad. There’s as much difference in Mylar bags as there is between a Chevy and a Toyota in terms of quality of materials. And so just because your Ford broke down that time doesn’t mean even every Ford will, let alone another brand.

6: The one actual benefit of a good 7 mil bag: tensile strength and the ability to resist punctures. Yes, if you have puncture prone food, by all means use a 7 mil bag. But if you are only worried about longevity, you can’t go wrong with a 5 mil bag produced by a manufacturer who cares about a quality product, and there are several on the market.

It’s been a while since I did a too-long post, so this one’s been cooking for a while.  Being more active in Facebook groups has made me start to re-examine every bit of advice I’ve both given and received as ‘conventional wisdom’ over the years.  I’ve put up over a hundred bags of food recently, and I’ve gone back over my thousand+ other bags and it’s made me change my thoughts on one bit of advice I’ve been reading recently. 

The question I’m posing today is an easy one: should your Mylar bags contract when using an oxygen absorber?   The reason I felt the need to write this is to clarify some information I see people giving out on this subject.  Additionally, there was a gentleman in one of my earlier threads that said essentially none of his bags contracted and he thought it was OK because of what people were saying, and that started to worry me.  We (as a community) may have let the contraction issue slide too easily, and here’s why.  One of the most common answers to the question is a variation of : ‘they don’t have to, as air is only 20% oxygen, and that’s all that’d being absorbed.’  While true, that’s not nearly a complete answer.

TL; DR:  My new concise answer to this question is now:  Assuming your bag is mostly full and barring powders, yes, your Mylar bags should contract if using an oxygen absorber.  If they don’t (or haven’t), I would test a bag or two.  Of the dozens of food types, both dry goods and freeze dried foods I have stored (a partial listing at the bottom), the only ones where I can’t see some contraction are powders:  mainly flour and eggs.  There are a couple of other food types that show less contraction, such as bread or oats. Food in 7 Mil bags show less contraction than in 5 Mil bags, due to higher tensile strength and less ‘printing’ (This is where you can run your nail down a Mylar bag and see a line). Finally, heavy small bags, such as 7 mil 5″x7″x3″ bags, will show very little contraction vs. larger or lighter bags, especially if not completely full.

My concern is that some of the food storage supply companies may be deflecting from the fact that their absorbers are under-weighted (see experiment in a few paragraphs) by saying that its OK for your food to not contract.  And some of the freeze dry and prepper user base has picked up on that and there’s very little concern over bags not contracting.

So I did an experiment with samples I recently purchased from one of the most popular food storage companies.  I’m not going to name names, because I’d rather have folks reproduce this on their own than take my word for it if they feel my methodology has some holes.

Experiment Part A:

1:  2 brands of Oxygen Absorber, Brand A and Brand B; the Brand A oxygen absorbers are rated 300cc, and the Brand B oxygen absorbers are rated 400cc.  Generally speaking, 300cc is considered the right amount to clear a 1 gallon bag filled with food. The 300cc Brand A absorbers weigh approximately .303 ounce per packet; the 400cc Brand B absorbers weigh approximately .094 ounce per unit.

2:  20 8”x12”x4” 9 Cup 5 Mil (2.25 quart) Mylar Bags; both absorbers should have 0 issues with clearing this size bag, and this experiment should have ended here.

3:  Half the Bags are filled with Macaroni (approx. 2.75 lbs), and half with Quick Oats (approx. 2 lbs, they are way less dense).  Each Brand of Oxygen Absorber was used in 5 bags of Macaroni, and 5 Bags of Quick Oats.

I thought the initial part of the experiment would be a 1 and done.  Either all of the bags would contract or all of the pasta bags would contract (but not the oats, because I’ve heard for 15 years they often won’t, and it’s not something I’ve added to my storage until just recently) and that would be the end of the experiment.  However, when I came in the next day to check, something I didn’t expect had occurred.  All 10 bags of the Brand A oxygen absorbers (the ones I generally use) had fully contracted, all 5 of the brand B pasta bags had contracted, but all 5 brand B oats bags had either not contracted or ran out of capacity before they fully contracted.  A few of the brand B oat bags had the beginning stages of contraction, but not completely.

What does this tell us?  My thought is that the Brand B absorbers, which you can tell from the pictures are very small compared to the ones I normally use, had enough capacity to clear the Pasta, but not enough capacity to clear the Oats.  So what does THAT tell us?  A 300cc rated absorber, at exactly its rating, should clear 1.5 liters of air of oxygen.  A 400cc rated absorber, at exactly its rating, should clear 2 liters of air of oxygen.  The 2.25 quart bags I was using = 2.13 liters of air.  Meaning, both absorbers should be able to almost clear the bags with NOTHING IN THEM.  The fact that the 400cc absorber struggled to clear full bags of oats is a strong indication that its given capacity rating is suspect. (and potentially dangerous if people are relying on them in  2 quart+ bags) 

I don’t know if any math geniuses out there want to help me with this, but even if the full bags of oats had 50% internal airspace, the absorbers would only have had to clear 1.07 liters of air, well below the 2.0 liters 400cc absorbers SHOULD clear.  The pasta bags specific density WAS high enough for them to clear, so we know the actual capacity of those 400cc absorbers is somewhere between the Food Density (my made up word to describe how much internal airspace a particular food has) of Oats x 2.13 liters and the Food Density of Pasta x 2.13 liters.  In any case, I think I can state with certainty that those 400cc absorbers don’t actually rate 400cc. Yes, that sentence is hard to read, but I think it says what I want it to.=)

BUT, this made me need to add an extra step to this process.  Because the Brand B absorbers did work on Pasta, I decided to re-test using 1 gallon bags, the size that both absorbers should be able to clear, assuming a Food Density of 60% or higher (meaning a 300cc is supposed to clear 1.5 liters in a 3.7 liter bag, or about 40%).

Part of me didn’t want to do this test, because I knew the likely result and I hate rebagging food.=)  But its ‘For Science!’  If the Brand B absorbers had trouble clearing a 2.25 quart bag, they weren’t going to clear a 4 quart bag.  And I know the Brand A 300cc absorbers have an actual rating north of 1000cc, or 4.0 liters, which is greater than the size of the bag empty, so I knew it wouldn’t be an issue clearing even a much bigger bag.

Experiment Part B:  I was running out of food to put up and the gallon bags are way bigger, so this is more ad hoc.

1:  Same absorbers as in Part A

2:  12 10”x14” 5 Mil 1 gallon (4 quart, 16 cups) Mylar bags.

3:  The bags are filled with either Flour (another food I’ve always heard won’t contract) or various kinds of pasta (Medium shells, Penne, Macaroni, all of which should have a bit of different Density).

Results:  The results were exactly as expected.  All of the Brand A absorber bags were fully contracted, and none of the Brand B absorbers contracted at all.  Note about flour:  flour doesn’t have any ‘kernels’ or anything to contract around and show a nice pattern, but you call tell they contracted based on the little ‘bubble’ of air that sits at the top of the bag.  The Mylar on both sides of the bubble pulled together; its hard to see from the photo, but if you do it yourself you’ll see what I mean.  So yeah, the wisdom that says flour won’t contract seems accurate enough from a visual standpoint; you actually have to feel the bag to know it worked.

So what’s the verdict? 

1. Almost every food I’ve ever done other than powders (flour and eggs) have visibly contracted.  Some were much milder than others (grilled cheese in small bags, for example)
2. Even though the Pasta bags for the Brand B absorber contracted, I’m not confident they have enough capacity left to last 30 years to continue removing the very minor bit of oxygen passing through yearly.
3. The 5 mil bags handled all the kinds of pasta just fine, even though I’d consider some of it ‘pokey’.  Another win for quality 5 mil bags.

I’m updating my documentation and FAQ’s to more clearly represent that in almost all cases, yes, your food should be contracting, with these addendums:

7 mil bags ‘print’ less than 5 mil bags, so your contraction won’t be as deep and noticeable as with 5 mil bags.

Bags that are not mostly full may not appear to have contracted, but if you hold the bag you’ll feel that the sides have pulled toward each other. It may takes some fiddling to see what I mean, but if you do flour in full bags you should be able to get the gist of it.

Flour will not look contracted when complete, you’ll need to examine the bags closely to know for sure, especially the ‘bubble’ at the top of the bag.

Oats have more internal airspace than macaroni.  This one surprised me considering macaroni is kind of hollow.=)

Smaller bags show contraction less, but it should still be noticeable. 

This is the list of foods I’ve done that have shown contraction, stored in 5x8x3 and larger bags:

Dry Goods: Rice, Beans, Oats, Pasta, Wheat

A small sampling of my Freeze dried foods:  Chili, chicken and rice, turkey pepperoni, shredded cheese, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, turkey kielbasa, turkey sausage, breakfast sausage, hash browns, tater rounds, sliced chicken, chunked chicken, apple fries, lasagna, strawberries, Skittles. And many more. My totes are all stacked and sealed, but looking into them I don’t see ANY that AREN’T contracted other than eggs.

Complete list of foods that don’t look contracted when properly sealed: Eggs (freeze dried), Flour (My assumption is other powders will show the same)

If you have food that’s not a powder you are confident is sealed correctly with a properly sized oxygen absorber and doesn’t show contraction, please let me know and I’ll do some testing.

Finally, and I stress this. These are my results. They have been consistent for these two brands of absorbers every time I’ve tested them (which is often), but that still doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your own testing. If you would like to test the Brand A absorber, this link will let you purchase 1 pack (including shipping) for $6 (basically my cost and shipping, so I’m not making anything here) so you can test for yourself. And then please send me a note with your results!

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or complaints! Thanks!

So as I mentioned last time, I’m trying to update the LDS Food Storage Calculators of old into something that fits my family (and hopefully many other families) better.

To show you where I’m starting from, and where most of the other Food Storage Calculators are basing their numbers, here is an example: LDS Food Storage Calculator

Now, if you are a good cook and are prepared to use those ingredients, more power to you! But right off the bat, in the grains section half of it is devoted to Wheat. First, at least in our family, we have multiple Celiacs and gluten sensitive folks. Those sensitivities are also growing in the general population. So having that high a percentage of wheat is a likely recipe for requiring 2 extra outhouses. Plus, if its a grid-down situation, grinding wheat is a labor-intensive process, and you’ll be burning a good bunch of the calories you’ll get by baking bread.

The legumes is another minor challenge. Again, most families aren’t regularly cooking split peas or soybeans, so I’m adding more of what we eat, and removing things we don’t. As an example, I’m bumping the Peanut Butter up by a factor of 10. It’s easily portable and stores for a couple of years (if you don’t get the organic). One jar of peanut butter (1lb) is basically the equivalent of 1 short day’s worth of calories; you could live on it. Again, Peanuts and Peanut butter are both good storage foods, though like wheat, there’s a lot more people who are allergic to peanuts today than their were 40 years ago, so plan accordingly.

At the end, I hope to have a more usable point to start a conversation on food storage with a bunch of y’all!

If you have a favorite shelf stable (at least 1 year) food you’d like to consider us putting in the new calculator, please let me know!

As always, if you need anything, hit us up at Discount Mylar Bags.

Links: https://www.happypreppers.com/Pioneers.html This is an interesting link to a pioneer crossing the US in the 1800’s, and what they would take with them for a 6 month journey.

https://grandpappy.org/hfoodaff.htm He was the one who came up with the original ‘year’s worth of food’ recipe back in 2008 or so, and updated in for inflation for about 5 years. I can’t find the original list, but I’ve seen in online. You can find his new more modest lists here now. This list is also an inspiration for our new updated FSC. He has an older looking site, but it has a lot of cool stuff available.

There are a lot of great preparedness resources out there in a world. There are hundreds of awesome blogs, Youtube channels, Instagram feeds, etc related to prepping. However, I’ve been looking around at the Food Storage Supply ecosystem (the sellers of food storage products), and I realize that even though there are some slick new brands out there, almost all of them are regurgitating products and information that’s been around for years. Some of them have taken information directly from my websites and passed them off as their own. (including one of my own suppliers lol, that was a shock!) A couple have based their entire bag size lines on what we’ve done. They do say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so I guess we’re doing something right!

No company other than Discount Mylar Bags (us) has really added anything new to the space (Such as SteelPak Bags, foil-packed desiccant, slow-acting oxygen absorbers and heat and serve meal pouches) in years, and it doesn’t look like any of them care to. Sure, they’ve got great photos, beautiful packaging and awesome marketing, but that’s what many of the modern companies are…marketing outfits who picked a product that did well over the past few years. Not 2 decade preppers who really want folks storing food. (I apologize if I sound a little frustrated! I am in fact jealous of their marketing talents!=))

One of the most egregious copy and paste jobs I’ve been examining are the Food Storage Calculators that have popped up on some competitors’ pages. The original source of info, the LDS, put together a recommended food storage list based on their average congregant. So yes, I think its a great starting point for a discussion on food storage, and I based my original food storage on it…in 2007. But almost 20 years prepping now and I recognize that for my average customer, these guides are outdated or unrealistic, recommending foods most folks have never cooked with. I would never make these recommendations to beginning preppers. I also think it’s funny that the folks copying these Food Storage Calculators to their websites have the original mis-spellings that have now been copied for multiple generations.=) These competitors aren’t actually looking at them, its just another widget for their website. However, the main problem is the original guide was intended for a group of people who practice homesteading, farming, and being self-sufficient. In 2024, that’s not most preppers.

Now, if that IS you, that’s amazing! But from the beginning, I have been trying to get anyone and everyone prepping. Urban young adults, rural octagenerians, suburban moms…everyone! A week at a time, a month at a time. Just something so that when something bad happens, you have a little to fall back on. Sure, I still think a full year’s worth of food for each person is the gold standard, but if you have an a 20-lb bag of rice, an 18-pack of Kraft Mac and Cheese and 3 boxes of Pop-Tarts put back, you are literally doing better than most of America.

Over the last 5 years I’ve revamped my food storage to more closely match my very picky, not homesteady family…because that’s who we are. Not folks who are prepared to grind hundreds of pounds of wheat when the power goes out, or folks who are going to forage my 30 acres of miserable scrubland looking for herbs. In other words, we’re #preppernormal, not #prepperhardcore. I respect and honor you if you have a homestead and survival skills, it’s just not something that fits our lifestyle. I have enough on my plate trying to keep several small businesses going, helping to home school 4 kids, and find the time to pursue a couple of my own dreams (writing a book, publishing a board game). And somewhere in there I’m trying to squeeze time in to make videos, write a blog, and read some good books.=) So I prep where I can (which mainly means putting stuff back), but I’ll never be Les Stroud. And I long ago came to the conclusion, that’s OK. It’s possible the world may not end, at least not in the post-apocalyptic manner many talk about. It’s possible we go through a long, slow decline a la many empires, where who’s in charge is less important than making sure our families are fed.

So while I wish more folks were super preppers (including myself in a universe where there are 95 hours in a day), from my conversations with 100’s of preppers over more than a dozen years, most are more like my family. Folks putting stuff aside to give a little leg up in an emergency or grid down situation…but we’re not the folks overhauling our entire lifestyle.

So over the next little bit, I am going to revamp and unveil a new, more up-to-date food storage recommendation guide. Yes, it’ll be a little less healthy than the original LDS guide, it’ll have a bit more focus on long shelf-life processed foods, but for many families, it will match our current diets and lifestyles more. And of course, you should always add or subtract foods that fit your family, but I’ll also have the reasons for recommending each food based on my family and experiences.

Next blog, I will let you know what I am using as my starting point, my criteria for including a product on my storage list, and the specifics of how many calories I’m aiming for.

Hey y’all, I know its been a while! God blessed us with an amazing new opportunity, and we’ve been pouring a lot of time and energy into that. One of the things that Discount Mylar Bags has taught us over the years is how to ship things. Since we started, we’ve shipped out over a million packages. Through a combination of providence and coincidence, we are now leveraging that skill set and shipping packages for a great local board game company. That includes their day to day shipments as well as their sometimes $2,000,000 Kickstarters.

Over the years, we’ve always believed in diversification as a form of prepping, because we’ve slowly been pushed off of Amazon by our lack of ‘Amazon Knowledge’. And nowadays, Amazon Knowledge is way more important than actually having a quality product. That’s why my wife and I live frugally, and her most common shopping trip is to Goodwill (This was also true in 2005, long before starting our businesses) . Our focus is our family and serving our community. We’ve opened a game store, started several online businesses dealing with collectibles or gaming accessories, and constantly look out for untapped value in the marketplace. (I found another amazing product, a patent coming off its 20 years, that I hope we’ll be offering before the end of the year!)

So what’s the problem with Amazon, you may ask? Well, the main thing is that the best products can very easily be overshadowed by slick-looking, well marketed products. A few years back, Amazon had to start protecting Name Brand items such as Revlon, Norelco, or Samsung, because no-name white-labelers were just better at marketing than even long-running, ultra-quality name brands, and the good products would be buried 10 pages back. You may remember those days. Nowadays, you’ll usually find a Name Brand on page 1, but you’ll still also find 900 knockoffs from Alibaba also with tens of thousands of positive reviews.

I constantly tell my friends who have their own businesses, or want to start one, that the product you are selling isn’t that important to whether your business is successful or not. Success in many fields today is about whether you can market yourself and your product successfully. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been only modestly successful at my marketing efforts. Whether its our local game store or drive-in, an ecommerce store, a podcast, a blog, or a board game, having a great product is only the very first step in having a successful business. BUT…and this is the crux…if you learn how to drive eyeballs and sales, you can make ANY product successful. Just take a look online and you’ll see the proof of this every day.

My anecdotal story to go with this: for about 2 years I tried 5 different electric razors off of Amazon. This was back in 2016 or so, a few years before the absolute wave of knock-off brands. All 5 razors sucked. I got so fed up because I couldn’t find a decent razor on Amazon, even though every one I bought had thousands of positive reviews. Finally, I went to my local Walgreens and bought a bright-yellow Norelco, the only one they had. 7 years later, and that’s still the one I’m using. Sometimes the name brands got their brand name because they were just good, and reliable. I bought a 15 year old hose off of eBay, because the new generation of stretchy hoses I kept getting from Amazon are just terrible.

This is the place where we’ve found ourselves. My company has the highest rated absorbers and strongest bags (and that’s not just advertising, that’s tested), and we’re back on page 20 behind products that are measurably worse in every way. Many of our competitors have given away thousands of products in exchange for 5 star reviews so it looks like they are much better products than they are, and that’s just something I’m not going to participate in. Now, we’re not folks to dwell on things, so we still do the best we can via our website (Discount Mylar Bags), but the writing is on the wall at least when it comes to the retail market which is dominated by Amazon. We’re doing OK on the wholesale side, selling to companies who use our products to package everything from jerky and horse supplements to freeze-dried foods and archival documents, but even that is a long way from the Halcyon days of COVID when we tripled our staff and moved an insane amount of product (ironically, it was that year of sales that triggered all the computer programs to tell people to start selling prepper supplies).

That was a pretty long intro to say this: if you want the best, highest-rated Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers, you won’t find them on Amazon without digging down to page 20. Take a look at this chart (click it to see a larger version):

Now, if you’ve spent some time on Amazon, you’ll recognize most or all of these brands. One of these brands, whose absorbers don’t even absorb their rated capacity of 300cc, has thousands of 5 star reviews, and most of their products are rated 4.5 stars or above overall. The highest rated product (ours), which beats the number 2 brand by almost 35%, can barely be found. That’s the world we’re living in now. Yes, this chart shows what you think it does: our 300cc absorbers tested at 1103cc actual absorption, or nearly 400% their rated capacity. I’m convinced that one of the companies testing under 300cc actual absorption has been selling the wrong sized absorbers, FOR THREE YEARS. And they still have thousands of great reviews. Of course, they’ll never admit that, and they rabidly attack folks on Youtube who suggest that their products are terrible (which they are).

That’s the thing, many of these companies have no idea what Mylar bags or oxygen absorbers are or what they do…they found them via a computer program that told them ‘these things sell good on Amazon, you should buy a bunch and make a listing’. Many of them are simply choosing the least expensive bags and absorbers they can find, relabeling it with their name, and marketing the crap out of it. And sadly, it works. The next chart is for Mylar Bags. Same story, ours are better by a long way. I’ve got MOCON permeation testing (OTR and MVTR) in the works, and I fully expect those results to be consistent as well.

But this is my commitment: I’ll keep showing the charts and information, and hope that a few make the choice to buy Just Better Bags. We’ve been here 13 years, which is 7 years longer than any other company on these lists except Harvest Right, and 10 years longer than several. I hope we’ll be here 13 more and one of my daughters takes it over and runs it better than I do.

So that’s that, but what about the name of this post? Living Free in Tennessee is the name of my friend Nicole’s podcast and media empire! She has a 800+ episode podcast, roasts her own coffee, and has an amazing homestead. Her and a friend company are putting on an awesome event this weekend (the Self Reliance Festival, Oct 14-15, Camden, TN), and that’s where we’ll be!

Thanks y’all, I love you, and am very grateful for the crazy awesome life y’all have helped make possible!