I wasn’t kidding when I said I have a well stocked pantry. This is by far the biggest reason why our grocery budget is so low. We have a year’s supply of canned goods, wheat, beans, dry milk, oatmeal, and the ever important chocolate chips. It took several years to accumulate all the goods and then several more to fine tune a system for rotating and keeping track of all the food so that nothing goes to waste. If you’re interested in how we did it read on. If not, see you at the next post. 😀
Why a year’s supply of food? We are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and have been counseled to have a year’s supply of food on hand for emergencies like loss of employment, natural disasters, etc. Recently, though, the year supply counsel has been cut down to three months. You can read more about it on the church’s Family Home Storage site.
I decided if we were going to store a year’s supply of food I wanted it to be food we normally eat. Since we usually eat the same dishes from month to month I kept track of everything we ate. Every can of cream soup, every bag of flour, every cup of oatmeal was marked down. At the end of the month I had a good list of a wide variety of foods. I multiplied the numbers by twelve to get my yearly total for the food we would need. That part was easy enough. Then came crunch time figuring out the cost of buying it all and storing it. When we started this journey we were living in an 800 square foot home with four little kiddos. It was interesting to figure out where to store the cans.
Our family eats so much we’ve graduated from using #10 cans to using 5 and 6 gallon buckets for storing our food. I have rectangular Tupperware containers that I fill and use in the kitchen. Did you know that one #10 can fills a #2 size Tupperware container perfectly? Don’t you love our dirty garage floor?
In my Planning a Menu post Ice Cream asked if we had a separate budget for restocking our food storage/pantry items or if they were included in our grocery budget. The answer is yes and no. How’s that for being diplomatic? Any extra from our weekly grocery budget gets rolled over to the next week’s budget. Then when canned goods go on sale I usually have enough to restock what we’ve used.
About once a year I go through and recalculate what our needs are as our family grows in size and the kids get older and eat more. If I find we are lacking then I will take some of that month’s savings (usually about $200) and buy what we need from Winco. Add that to our grocery budget and we average $104 per week on groceries.
A word about the rolling can shelves: We got those earlier this year and they are GREAT!!! I can’t believe how much time I wasted rotating canned goods before – moving older cans forward, putting new cans in the back, knocking down the cans I had just moved forward, trying to get them all to play nice and stack right. These shelves are definitely worth the investment, especially when you have as much food as we do. Each shelf holds over 300 cans of food. You can also buy racks that fit on your existing kitchen cabinet shelves. I’ve found the rotating racks hold one less can than what would fit if you stacked the cans in the same space. We bought ours from ShelfReliance.
And if you’re interested, our yearly supply of chocolate chips equals 100 lbs. It fits into three 5 gallon buckets. 😀
I have seen these Shelfreliance systems before and I love them. Some day when we get our house I will get some 🙂 !!
You organization inspires me. We have a food storage, as much as we can in a little apartment, and I get a lot of what we store from WinCo.
Where do you get your 5 gallon buckets?
I’m drooling just a little bit over those shelves.
Back in the 70s my grandpa had some custom-made for his pantry and I’ve thought they were the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
What model do you have?
Wow that is impressive. I need to work on my food storage and to rotate what I do have. On a side note I tried the bread. My dough was pretty sticky even after I added all the flour so I kept adding on till I thought it looked right. The bread was delicious if I do say so myself. Not bad for my only second attempt at making bread.
Love ya,
Aunt Nancy
You are using almost 1/2 lb of chocolate chips a week? Wow! I’m on my way over…have cookies ready! 😀
I buy the 10# bags of chocolate chips when they are at Costco, but that takes us like 4-5 months to use up.
We are working on re-building up our food storage, since we used most of it up before we moved. I barely grocery shopped last summer at all, because I did not want to move food storage.
Wow… that is a well stocked pantry. We live in a small duplex that doesn’t even have a garage so all our storage goes inside the house. So far we have been able to keep about a 4 month supply of most of the foods we eat.
You are amazing! And those shelves are so great. My husband has always drooled over them.
Wow! I’m inspired! I keep thinking that I don’t have enough space for food storage! If you can do it, I can, too! I love your system!
Thanks!
amazing. I really need to work on my years worth of chocolate storage 🙂
100 pounds of chocolate chips, eh? I guess I DON”T have a year’s supply.
Your pictures and your organization are quite impressive. I am in awe of what you have been able to do. I love your system for building up a food storage. It has always seemed such a daunting task but you make it sound so simple.
You rock! I love your pantry of food. You always amaze me.
you’re so good–we have a supply but I have a hard time rotating it. Except the chocolate chips. We rotate those rather regularly 🙂
i’ve always wanted shelves like those. I have to do the whole, take everything out then put it abck in, system of rotating. your food storage rocks! I’m getting closer and closer to having a complete storage. If fact, in a few days I’m going to WinCo with An Ordinary Mom to restock for the Holidays.
=) I love it when my shelves are full.
Wow, the shelves for your can look great. I couldn’t imagine having that much food stored up, esp in such a small space. Glad you found a system that works for you!
Oh my glory…my pantry is weeping in embarrassment…
I’m going to ask for those shelves for Christmas. Do you only have two? Would you use more if you had them?
We just bought 250 pounds of wheat, 250 pounds of oats, and 75 pounds of beans today. Do you know how many pounds of wheat will fit in a five gallon bucket? I ordered 20 buckets but I know I will need more. I looked on line and I guess I need 1600 pounds of grains for our family of 6 for a year. Plus 350 pounds of beans.
Now that we are finally settled into our house and the basement is cleaned out I am getting serious about our food storage. You are inspiring!!! Wish me luck!
I wish I had that much storage space.