The Food Storage Blog

Some ideas for how folks can organize their preparedness supplies in normal-sized spaces from Self-Reliant Sisters.

(H/T to www.whenshtf.com)

For my wife and I, and many others, food storage has become a little bit of an addiction. It combines two of our favorite themes, preparedness and saving money, in one neat little package. While many in the preparedness community stress having a good food storage plan as a foundational principle, I do it now more for the financial benefits. As a procurement professional I have noticed that having a food storage program allows us to leverage the quantity of our purchases, when we buy things, and the price benefit of both.

What are the main financial benefits of a robust storage program?

1) You only need to buy when you see something on sale. As I mentioned several posts back, typically the only things we don’t buy on sale now are perishables and milk. And the perishables no longer even include bread, as we have begun baking our own with a brand new breadmaker we found on Craigslist for $40. The benefits to our checking account has been immense. As I learned while perusing the Coupon Mom website, most items go on sale on a certain cycle, usually ever 6-12 weeks. Now, instead of picking up a box of Special K whenever we run out, we buy 10 boxes when it is on sale. And the last time it was on sale it was actually Buy One Get One Free, and we picked up almost as many boxes as a cart would hold. Savings: $2.50 per box times 10, or $25.

2) Buying in bulk saves money. Almost everyone knows this, but many either don’t think about it often or worry about where they are going to store something they have bought. We simply reserved one room of the house to be our food storage/shipping and eBay room, and filled it with racks where we could store things. I felt almost a little sheephish when my wife was at Costco and found the same Special K with a regular price the same as what I found at the BOGO sale, except packaged larger (37 oz boxes instead of 12 oz boxes) – 1 large box cost $7.50 vs. 3 small boxes costing $7.50 (though originally $15).  Because of Costco, now I can buy the lowest priced option at any time for half its regular price. If you have access to a Costco, Sam’s Club or BJ’s, you should definitely take advantage of their everyday savings in comparison to the grocery store! (Plus, they are a good place to pick up large quantities of staples like, (guess what!), rice and beans)

3) Try the off brand. Not every experience I’ve had with private label brands has been great, but there are a good many items where I can’t tell the difference between it and the Name Brand.  For example, my local HG Hills (not a great store, but its the closest grocery to my house) has around 20′ of shelf space right upon entering the store where they have many of their private label items. One day on a whim I picked up a couple boxes of $.35 macaroni and cheese, and $.43 cans of corn and green beans.  The equivalent prices of the name brands is $1.39 for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and around $1 for Green Giant corn and green beans. I thought the mac and cheese was great (with a little Truffle Salt my wife picked up) and the corn, while not quite as perfect as Publix’s private label, was still quite good.  The AdviceWife thought the green beans were fine as well.

The next time I went to HG Hills they probably thought I must have lost my job or someting as I picked up around 10 boxes of mac and cheese and 2 cases of their vegetables.  I also bought some other items to test (chili fixins mainly) and I’ll let y’all know how they perform as well once I get to making some.  Total savings over 12 months vs. name brand on just 3 items: $125 or more, assuming we eat each once a week.

Now, the above examples are just for 4 food items, and we do the same for every regular item we eat.  At $50 a year savings on average for each item, that’s $200.  On the 30-40 items we regular keep and eat, it’s more like $2,000 a year saved, not through sacrificing our tastes, but simply through better buying.  On occasion my wife clips coupons and we add a little bit more to the total.

So don’t just take a look at what you’re buying, examine how you are buying it and you’ll likely find a significant amount of dollars you can save.

Thanks to everyone who has stopped by during our first thirty days, it’s much appreciated! After a month, I’ve a much better handle on a lot of things.  However, to be honest, my strategy on how to pay for the site is not one of them.  The Amazon affiliate linkings got quite a few click-throughs, but not a single purchase.  I’m not sure if folks just hate affiliate links, but 0 for 500 seems like an epic fail to me.=)

I’m going to take a short hiatus from posting main articles (though I’ll still pass along helpful links as I find them) and use that time to re-evaluate the content and maybe offer folks a little more.  I plan on adding a couple of additional SKU’s to the Food Storage Store and quite a few more items to the Gear Store.  I also plan on re-creating the excellent LDS Food Storage Calculator here on Advice and Beans, though without all the noise of the About.com page and with some additional functionality.

I also have begun work on a huge long-term project that I think will be great for the Preparedness/Survival community at large; as I flesh it out and need some input, I’ll begin posting here.

It’s not a vacation, but I’ll see y’all in a few!

The Advice and Beans Food Storage Plan 3-6 Months

You might also find it odd that I sell long-term storage products (oxygen absorbers and Mylar bags), and yet I’m not going to push the ‘buckets and beans’ approach to food storage, at least for a food storage plan intended to last less than 6 months.

That’s because while I think rice and beans have their place in a looooong-term storage plan, such as if you decide to store 6 months to 2 years of food or more, for any plan 6-months or less, you can probably store your everyday eats (assuming you have the space) and be just fine. That doesn’t mean you should store just your regular diet, but it will most likely make up the bulk of your storage.

So what’s the plan?

1) Plan first, store later.

If you read my post from Monday, you know that I made some horrid early food storage mistakes. These stemmed mainly from a lack of planning. As you read through the whole plan, think about what your most common meals are. For me, breakfast is the same 5 days a week, a bowl of Special K and some Apple Juice. Dinner is pasta, chicken, or meat and potatoes at least 5 times a week as well. Thus, when we shop, we pay special attention to finding good deals on those foods.

Next, thing about how you are going to organize your food. If you buy in bulk like I did, you can rapidly fill up some shelves! (We’re at 4 and counting)

2)  Have something available to eat…right now.

It is incredibly important to have a certain amount of ‘portable and painless’ food in your plan. Emergencies and disasters can be exhausting, and having to think about cooking right at the beginning is just one more unnecessary burden.

My wife and I meet this in a couple of ways.  First, have a couple of cases of MRE’s. These are not the C-Rations your dad or grandad told you about that they ate in the military. While they are not gourmet, I rather enjoy most MRE’s. If someone is picky about hot food, make sure you get the one’s with heaters, as they are only a tad more expensive.

I also now store food I can readily cook with my Jetboil Camping Stove. Things such as Progresso soup, cocoa and coffee.

Finally, we always have on hand, sealed in plastic totes, various snack packs, Oreo’s, ritz crackers, and peanut butter. Again, nothing is gourmet and we wouldn’t want to live on it long-term, but we have a variety of filling, family-friendly food.

These types of foods provide plenty of nutrition and calories for a short-term emergency up to perhaps a 7-day power outage. The MRE’s are also convenient if you have to send someone out for some reason, as they are self-contained and have a high calories count. (Typically 1500-2000 for civilian MRE’s)

Some other foods that you could store for this purpose, but that we don’t (in quantity at least) are Slim Jim’s Mean and Cheese packs (an easy 200 calories that doesn’t taste horrible and is not just meat), power bars (these need to be rotated faster than you might think though), and dry soups such as Cup-a-Noodle (assuming you also store a method to boil water if the power is out)

2) Don’t switch your diet if you don’t want to.

While my wife and I now rather enjoy cooking with our ‘beans (and wheat, and oats) and rice’, after doing an examination of expiration dates, I’ve come to the conclusion we didn’t have to.

By checking expiration dates, you will know how much of a given food you could store without worrying about any of it going bad.  For example, if you eat 6 cans of green beans and canned corn per week, and the average expiration date is 2 years away, you could store 600 cans of green beans and canned corn and never worry about it going bad! Next, take a look at your peanut butter. I eat the Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter and it has a relatively short shelf life, around 6 months. I eat about 1 can per month. In my basement, I have 6 cans stored. However, my wife eats regular Jif, which has almost a 2 year shelf life, so we store more of hers than mine.

If you do this for every food that is in your pantry, you will find that you can keep larger stocks of 70-80% of your regularly groceries and avoid some of the hassles associated with ultra-long term food storage. Obviously the one challenge is perishables. For me, that means I also store dry milk, a grain grinder so we can make flour if we need to (whole wheat is much better for you anyway!) to bake bread, and sufficient water to cook with.

3) Make sure you rotate.

Our food storage set-up makes it very easy to rotate our foods. When I need peanut butter, I just go downstairs and get it. When I come in from the grocery store, it is right next to our food storage racks. I simply drop off all my food storage food and take the rest of the perishables upstairs. Usually it sits on the floor til the weekend when my wife or I go down to properly organize it.

Some folks might not have such an easy set-up, but in order to not waste food, some method should be established where you are always eating the oldest.

4) Buy some of each.

Don’t do what I did, and make sure if you decide on a 6-month food storage plan, you don’t buy just 6 months of green beans on one grocery run, 6 months of peanut butter the next, etc. That is a surefire way to make sure you only have half-a-pantry when something bad does happen.

5) Buy in bulk and on sale.

While this might sound like it contradicts point #4, it doesn’t really.  This rule really took effect for us after we had a good base of food storage.  Once we were in a position where we didn’t go to the grocery store every week, when we do go to the store, we are now much more able to focus on items that are on sale.

However, even earlier on if you see a great deal on one particular item and you have the cash to purchase it, don’t hesitate.  For example, I was in Walmart last week and I saw Apple Juice 96oz containers on sale for $1.50 (regularly $2.06).  While many people might walk out with 1 and save themselves $.56, I know I will drink it and thus bought 10 and saved $5.60.  Sure, it takes up some space, but we’re set up to do it and I’d rather not go back 2 weeks later and find that the price is now $2.25!  Also, at $15 it is definitely a good portion of my allotted food storage money, but not enough that I didn’t also pick up some extra canned peaches (also on sale).

At your regular grocery stores, find out where and when the deals are.  For example, I religiously check Publix’s buy-one-get-one page.  If you have access to a Costco or Sam’s Club, take advantage of both buying in volume and at lower prices.  Aldi’s, Dollar General, and Sav-a-Lot are also local venues where we find great prices.

6)  Include something sweet.

This is a must!  Chocolate chip cookies, Thin Mints, or some M&M’s all store well enough in cool environments to last a minimum 3-6 months.  Both adults and kids need some normalcy during an emergency, and something sweet definitely fits the bill.  For something that lasts a little longer, consider jello (if you know you’ll be able to make it) or hot cocoa.

Other Resources

A special note, for those without a lot of space, start with their great article on small spaces food organizing.

As we had a number of water-related posts during the flooding in Nashville, this week we will be doing a full run of food-storage related posts.  As we’ve stated on this blog before, all supply storage is simply a bridge to help us to get from the beginning of an emergency to the end.  It doesn’t replace developing a mindset (fortitude) that allows us to be a rock for our family when they need us most, nor the skills that might be able to provide for us long term (gardening, cooking, splitting firewood, fishing, hunting, etc).

Let’s talk food storage

Whether you have relatively little room in your home to store extra food and toiletries or enough space to put away several years worth of vittles and toothpaste, there are a number of reasons to store food.  In today’s economic climate, the potential for losing one’s job would be at the top of my list of reasons to start a program.  Imagine knowing that if you lost your job, you wouldn’t have to buy, or would only have to buy a limited amount of, food for a month, 6 months or a year.  A good food storage program provides peace of mind.

However, it’s not going to happen by magic, and there are quite a few potential pitfalls.  My families ‘road to food storage’ included more than a few mistakes that I will share in the hope that yours will be more fruitful, and quicker than ours was.  Before I move on to the Advice and Beans Food Storage Plan in Wednesday’s post, I’ll list some of the things we did wrong.

My biggest Oopses

Error 1)  I first stored one thing, rice, in large quantities.  Don’t!  While I was at least doing something, I hadn’t really developed a plan.  Rice requires a lot of water to cook, and in an emergency situation, water might be hard to come by.  By extension, boiling water requires a lot of energy…and fuel might be just as challenging to come by if the power is out, as I don’t have a generator or wood stove.  Finally, while I like rice, I don’t like just rice…appetite fatigue would strike on a diet of just one item within a matter of a week or two.  Plus, while rice would provide the calories my family needs to survive, it wouldn’t contain many of the essential vitamins and minerals as well.

Error 2)  I can be a bit thick-headed at times, so I doubled up on the rice-buying error by then buying 100 pounds of white wheat (But it was a steal at around $10 for high-quality wheat!).  When I bought it, I had no idea what to actually do with it.  I didn’t have a way to grind it into flour to make bread or cookies with it.  I didn’t know how I was going to store it.  Heck, I didn’t even know if I liked it.  Since then I have come to appreciate our supplies of wheat. However when first starting out, do not buy things you are not sure you will, or can, use!

3rd error)  Not eating from our food storage.  I eventually thought I had things squared away…I stored more water for our rice.  I had a fuel plan.  I had stored a larger variety of food…red wheat, white wheat, oats, flour, beans, sugar, salt.  Notice a pattern yet?  I didn’t have anything to actually eat without effort.  Everything would need to be prepared, but because I didn’t eat from my food storage I didn’t realize it.  One of the main components of any good food storage plan is:  Make sure you have something you can eat right now!

So now you know our dirty little secrets, and they were some big ones!  No one just wakes up one day knowing how to store food in the perfect manner for their family.  However, what is one of the tenets here at Advice and Beans?  Persistence.  I had a goal, and I was going to move toward that goal until I got there.

Through a number of resources, such as an LDS friend at work who also stores food, as well as reading some James Wesley, Rawles, I eventually came to the obvious solution, and one that I had read about a long time prior, but had not internalized:  Store what you eat, eat what you store.

Yes, I had a ‘well, duh’ moment. 

At that point, for the first time, I actually developed a plan.  So don’t do what I did and follow this advice:  Plan first, buy later.  Know what you are trying to accomplish, and only purchase items that meet those objectives.  If your house’s power goes out every time a gentle breeze blows, buy more food that you can eat without cooking it.  If water is going to be a potential challenge, pasta and rice should not make up a huge portion of your food storage.  No one’s food storage plan is going to be exactly the same as everyone else’s.  Your plan needs to be adaptable, flexible, and maintainable.

Wednesday I will lay out a simple, comprehensive framework for a food storage program that you can then adapt to your needs, whether you decide to keep a 2-week or 2-year supply on hand.