maintain a food stockpile Archives

A big part of prepping is your pantry and knowing what to stockpile. Years ago I wrote a post on building your stockpile. However, I have learned a lot since that initial post, here are a few more ways to build your pantry.

How are you supposed to know what to stockpile?

At our home, we call it The Menu, this book is where we store all our favorite and frequented meals. If you are just starting, use note cards or notebook paper. The important thing is to make sure you write down what you are making and eating. When you have done this for a month you can look through your notes and find common ingredients, this is your starting point. Ingredients and spices that you use often and are comfortable with, should be your baseline.

How to build your pantry

Now that you have your list of the most used ingredients, you need to purchase them to stockpile. This can be done in a few ways, and as fast or slow as your budget allows. Start by buying an extra box or two on regular grocery shopping trips. My four favorite ways are listed below:

Warehouse Clubs –

We love Sam’s club and that is our go-to for our bulk grocery items. Flour, rice, different sugars, and even meat are great to stock up on here. There are different tiers of memberships and you can usually find a discount for your first year (i.e. a free year to try it out.) We for sure go twice a year, with these closest store being a hour and a half from us, but you can adjust this to your family’s needs.

Subscribe and Save Shipments –

There are a lot of websites where you can sign up for specific items to be sent on a regular basis, this setting normally comes with a discount. For the most part we use Amazon for Subscribe and Save of spices, different sauces, cleaning supplies and even personal hygiene items. There is an option to adjust the frequency and Subscribe and Save can often save you 15% on a regular basis, with an initial discount on top of that when you set it up. Another retailer we use for this is PetSmart with our dog’s food.

Shopping Sales and Clearance –

This is one way to save money that never changes for us. Always hit up grocery clearance for damaged packaging or brand relabeling. Another tip on grocery clearance is to make sure and check it out for one to three days following a storm, this is when I find the deepest discounts on fresh food and stock up. When you regularly watch sales, you will learn the patterns and can keep your pantry in line with that.

Local Farmers –

An initially large investment up front, when ave4raged out, it is often half the price of the grocery store. There are also some farmers who will work out payment plans with you. Make sure to follow your favorite local farmers on social media, they will often advertise an specials, whether someone backed out of their beef or it’s a weather related.

It can be overwhelming to start a pantry from nothing and be unsure of where to start. However, if you can get your most common ingredients together you have your shopping list. From there it is just investing the time to find the best deals for your budget.

Let me know in the comment section below your favorite tips to start and maintain a pantry!

So You Want to Start a Food Stockpile?

How to start a food stockpile has been a big question lately. With the weather doing crazy things it has people thinking about “doomsday” and how they can better prepare themselves. One of the best ways to prepare for a situation like that is to be ready to hunker down, this includes having a good stockpile of food. A good stockpile of food doesn’t just mean having a large quantity of food (even though that is part of it.) Having a good stockpile means having food that you eat on a normal basis, is delicious raising morale when it’s low, and foods that are easy to prepare.

Building a Stockpile

Where to start:

When starting a food stockpile it will take some time and preparation. The first place to look when you start a food stockpile is your very own pantry. Looking in your pantry can help you see what food is part of your diet in everyday life. This way of stocking up has three huge benefits:

Having things you eat regularly helps you rotate through your stockpile so that nothing spoils. This prevents you from wasting food AND money!
It is easy to prepare these items as you are familiar with them and use them on a semi-regular basis. For example, if you have rice kept on hand, chances are you have multiple recipes where rice is an ingredient. This saves time because you know how to prepare it and gives you a little variety as you are able to swap out recipes.
It builds morale! Food often carries a sense of nostalgia and good memories for us. Having food that is associated with good times just gives an extra boost of positivity on days when it is really hard to think of going forward. Not to mention, that when you eat something that tastes SO good, you just feel good too!

How to Stockpile:

Now that you have a list of food that you keep on hand at all times, you can start shopping for these items. This can be very overwhelming and can be very expensive if you just jump in all at once, you can take the stress off of starting your food stockpile by breaking it down into sections – this helps allow you to shop for the best deal as well!

A basic breakdown of categories to help you build your food stockpile would be:

Canned veggies
Rice and Pasta
Canned fruit
Sauces
Canned meat

You can absolutely adjust this to whatever your preference or needs are. Once you have the categories you can shop the sales!

There are four ways to get the most for your dollar when starting your food stockpile and maintaining it from there:

Shop sales! Seriously, get to know your local variety of grocery stores and their weekly ads! You can generally figure out the rotation of when they will have different categories on sale, it is usually a six-week rotation. The items that are advertised in the weekly ads are “loss leaders,” which are to get you in the store to buy other items while you are there. If you have a very strict budget STICK to your list and just pick up the items of the ad for your stockpile.
Coupons! Coupons are so much more than just the clip from the newspaper kind these days. While those are great, most stores have their own apps these days loaded with virtual savings. You can stack these with paper coupons as well if you get the chance. Coupon apps are great to watch before and after holidays especially. A couple of days after Easter I was able to score hams for $1 per pound thanks to Target’s Cartwheel app, and now we have those saved in the freezer.
Another great place to catch deals for your stockpile is the store’s grocery clearance and less than perfect product section. Many stores will mark down items for at least 30% when the packaging is damaged. This can add up to great savings for you. Just check over the product and make sure that you are comfortable with eating the food inside the packaging. An example of this is that not everyone is comfortable with dented cans, they don’t bother me so I ended up with a 6pack at .25 cents a can! You can also get steep discounts when a store is discontinuing a product so make sure to check for clearance!
Last but not least is the good old dollar store! They are a great place to pick up canned food as well as pasta, rice, and other longterm storage foods!

Specialty Items

The last thing to touch on when talking about starting a food stockpile is specialty items. Specialty items are your Mountain House, Backpacker’s Pantry and other freeze-dried meals as well as options like MREs. These tend to be spendier options than your average food. I like to just keep a few of our favorite varieties on hand for every once in a while. By making them a supplement to your food stockpile and not the bulk of it, it allows you to watch for sales and again clearance at sporting good stores and online retailers, making them much more affordable. For MREs I watch for deals on Amazon. I do this for freeze-dried meals as well, but I also look in brick and mortar stores for clearance when a new season is coming and the camping gear is resetting, making them much more budget friendly.

These are my tips to help you with starting a food stockpile, I hope they helped you out! Make sure you share any tips you have for starting and maintaining a food stockpile in the comment section below. I love to hear from you!