Getting Started With Food Storage

I've been thinking about Melanie's question about buying food-storage items locally instead of on the internet (buying non-food items will be covered later). I have a few things that I found helpful for me when I started stocking up on my food storage.

1. The Mormon's have a website (here) that will help anyone figure out what is needed for a family's one-year supply of food. This church has a storehouse in Fresno where they dry-pack (can) different food storage items, such as wheat, rice, oats, dehydrated apple slices, beans, flour, cocoa mix, etc., for a reasonable price (no freeze-dried foods). These items are for the church members, although non-members may purchase these items IF they go through a member. (A printable order form is here) . The order is phoned in by the member, and in a couple of weeks the member will be called and told when the order is ready to be picked up. Then the member, plus non-member if they want, will pay for and pick up the order. These items are sold in #10 cans, pouches, or in bulk.

2. For help with making a plan for buying, storing and eating food storage, Everyday Food Storage has a network of 3 or 4 websites that work together to guide you along. This, and the other links on our side-bar, show various ways to go about planning and buying food storage.

3. When I really got serious about stocking up, I used an Excel program that I found online, but I can't seem to find it now. The Food Storage Shopper has a special way of using coupons, which I found beneficial, especially when I used it with the Excel program--I saw huge savings.

I will explain how the Excel program worked:

Column one was for the item name.
Column two was the name of the store where I purchased the item at the lowest price.
Column three was for the cost of the item, at the lowest price I had found anywhere.
Column four was for how many ounces the product weighted.

At this point, when you tabbed over, it calculated the cost per ounce of the item (column five).

The second half of this program was for my base price information, so I knew what the product normally cost.

Column six was the base price in the market that I went to the most.
Column seven was the cost per item.
Column eight was how many ounces the product weighted.
Column nine was where you tabbed over and it calculated the cost per ounce of the product.

With this spreadsheet, I would take the market ads (including Walmart, Target, and the "drug" stores near my home), and my coupons, then I could plug-in the sale price into my spreadsheet to tell if the ads were the best price. I could see what the lowest price I had ever found the item for, and the normal everyday price. Adding the coupon to a really low priced item would give me a great discount, so I was getting more products with my limited funds. If the price was not at or below my "lowest" price, I would wait--the store ads run in cycles and they would have the "lowest" price, again. I also went to Costco and wrote down their everyday prices, and put them into the Excel program if they were the "lowest" price.

I hope that makes sense. It seems wordy to me for how simple it really is. If you know how to set up an Excel spreadsheet with calculations, then you won't have any problems with this.