How to Start a Food Stockpile Without Wasting Money

Most people who give up on a stockpile do it because they started too big. They buy a bucket of freeze-dried meals, put it in the loft, and forget about it. Three years later half of it is out of date and nobody wants to eat the rest.

The official advice is more modest. The US government's Ready.gov site asks for a several-day supply of non-perishable food, and FoodSafety.gov says at least three days. FEMA suggests considering two weeks, even though it calls a full two-week cut-off unlikely. Three days is a starting point. Two weeks is a sensible target once the habit is in place.

An adult eats somewhere around 2,000 calories a day, more if they are active or cold, less if they are small or older. Children vary a lot. Treat that as a planning figure, not a rule.

A worked example for two adults for 14 days:

• 2 people x 2,000 kcal x 14 days = 56,000 kcal
• Dry white rice has roughly 3,600 kcal per kilogram, so 1 kg covers nearly two days of calories for one adult, though you would not want to live on rice alone.
• If you want a third of the calories to come from rice and pasta, that is about 18,700 kcal, or around 5 kg of dry rice and pasta in total.

The rest comes from tins, oats, peanut butter, dried beans and lentils, cooking oil, and the small extras that make food worth eating. Prepparia's plan page does this sum for your household size and shows the gap against what you already have, which saves doing it on the back of an envelope.

Buy in this order, and stop when you feel covered:

1. Water. A gallon (about 4 litres) per person per day is the usual guide. It is cheap, it does not need cooking, and it is the item most people forget. See our water guide.
2. Ready-to-eat food. Tinned fish, meat, beans, vegetables and fruit that you can eat cold. If the power and gas are both off, this is what you will live on.
3. Cooking staples. Rice, pasta, oats, flour, lentils, cooking oil, salt, sugar, stock cubes.
4. Things that make it bearable. Tea, coffee, chocolate, spices, jam. FEMA and Ready.gov both list comfort foods. They are not frivolous when everyone is stressed.
5. A manual can opener. Every guide lists one because people still forget it.

Add one or two extra items to your normal weekly shop rather than doing one enormous panic buy. A tin or two of each thing over ten weeks costs almost nothing you would notice.

A stockpile only works if it is eaten and replaced. Put the oldest item at the front, write the date on anything without a clear one, and use from the stock in normal cooking. Then you are always buying new food to replace it, and the pantry never gets old all at once.

Two habits do most of the work: label what you buy (a date and a short code on every tin or bag), and check the shelf every few weeks. Our guides on rotation and labelling cover both.

The amounts and timeframes above follow guidance from Ready.gov: Food, FoodSafety.gov: Food Safety in a Disaster or Emergency and FEMA: Food and Water in an Emergency. The calorie figures are planning estimates, not medical advice. Anyone with a medical condition, special diet, infant or pregnancy should get advice from a doctor or dietitian.