Remembering Our 4-Legged Friends, Long Term Food Storage For Pets
I’m always thrilled to come home and see Mylar Bags on our freezer! My wife stored some cat and dog food this weekend. We buy our pet food in bulk, usually from Petsmart where my wife gets a huge discount twice a year. (Although we will gladly pick it up anywhere we find a deal, sometimes at Walmart, and occasionally in other pet stores we go in.)
The main thing to remember about pet foods is that most contain oils that can go rancid over time. (Sometimes the food will still be edible and provide calories, but will taste bad and can sometimes cause illness). While I recommend rotating pet foods yearly to avoid this, we’ve had good results when testing foods we’ve stored up to 2 years old.
Because our dogs are small (smaller than our Cat-Puma), my wife stores food in gallon bags. If your dogs are larger, 2 or 5 gallon bags might be more appropriate. We’ve taken to storing food that we will use within 12 months in totes, for both visibility of what we have, and because they stack nicely and fit on our racking more conveniently than buckets. For us, that means about 200-300lbs of various pet foods. If you have the space and are attached to your pets, I would store the same amount of days of food for them as you do for yourselves.