Use our food storage calculator below to determine how much food storage you will need for you and your family. Select the number of adults and children and select a time span for your food storage and we’ll tell you how much you need based on our food storage guidelines below!

 

 
+		  
x		  
=		  
Refresh

¹ Adults are persons weighing over 120 lbs.
² Children are persons weighing less than 120 lbs.

Food Storage Guidelines

There are no hard set rules on how much freeze dried food to store for an emergency. There are a number of general food storage guidelines, but that’s really all they are: guidelines. How much food, and what types of food you decide to store really depend on your personal preferences and budget. While it’s true that storing bulk dry goods is significantly cheaper than storing freeze dried meals, MRE’s and the like, we often fail to take into consideration the extra expense, time, energy, and skill required to prepare a meal from these items.

How many food storage enthusiasts do you know, for example, who have 3,000 pounds of wheat in their basement — but no hand-powered wheat grinder? And what about all those buckets of dried beans? Some critics berate freeze-dried food because it requires a lot of water, and fuel to heat the water. Sure you have the beans, and you feel secure in their presence… But have you ever cooked dried beans before? With the water and fuel required to cook one pot of beans, you could prepare 2 days worth of freeze dried meals. How good is that pot of beans going to taste, anyway, with nothing but dried onions, salt, and pepper — oh, and some TVP beef thrown in for flavor?

Speaking of fuel usage, freeze dried food re-constitutes much more quickly than dried foods. Preparing a hot freeze-dried meal in most cases requires only heating the water to boiling and adding to the food. Dried food, on the other hand, often requires boiling for 20 or more minutes. What’s more, many foods such as freeze dried raspberries, reconstitute just fine in cold water. In fact, a lot of freeze dried fruits are absolutely delicious eaten in their dried state. I don’t think it takes a physicist to determine that preparing a meal from bulk dried food takes significantly more fuel than a meal from freeze dried food.

I didn’t intend for this to become an article on the pros and cons of freeze dried vs. dried (I could go on forever). What I meant to do, rather, is give you some insight into why our food storage calculator — and in fact, our entire site — is devoted to freeze dried food. The short answer is, we grew up on bulk food storage… and while it has its merits, we have found through our experience that for all intents and purposes, if you have a long term supply of freeze dried food, you will not only survive through hard times, you will thrive.