Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
One of the most common reasons that people give for not prepping is the cost involved. People seem to have this mental image of a bedroom or basement dedicated to being filled to the rafters with cans of Chef-Boy-Ardee. They imagine someone going out and spending $5000 at a time for a year’s worth of food.
The fact is, a pantry is a work in progress.
You can save a fortune on your food budget by shopping carefully and in quantity.
A well-stocked food pantry is not just there in case of an epic disaster or TEOTWAWKI. It can provide a cushion in the event of a job loss or personal economic downturn. Not only that but as an investment, purchasing food at today’s prices is a great hedge against tomorrow’s increases. The cost of food will only be going up.
Take peanut butter, as an example: A few years ago, I purchased natural, no-stir peanut butter for $1.88 per jar when it was on sale. A year later, that very same brand in the very same sized jar was $5.99 on sale due to a poor peanut harvest. That means that each jar of peanut butter on the shelves represented a savings of $4.11 – there is no other investment that gives you that kind of return.
Before I even knew what prepping was, I had a well-stocked pantry. When I was first married and had a newborn baby, I was struggling to put food on the table with our tiny grocery budget. At the library, I stumbled upon a series of books by Amy Dacyczyn called “The Complete Tightwad Gazette
“. This fantastic series gave me a whole new perspective on grocery shopping, and is the shopping basic philosophy I adhere to still. (And I highly recommend the books – there are 3 or you can get one big compendium containing all 3 titles!)
When building your pantry, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither is your food storage!
Focus on building your pantry strategically.
What are your priorities? How many people are in your family? What are the likely scenarios you may face in your current location?
For us:
- The first priority is clean, healthy organic food.
- I am prepping for 3 people and 5 pets.
- We face frequent power outages from windstorms here – so frozen food and long cooking times are not practical.
- I want to have plenty of food to see me through the coming inflation of food prices.
With these thoughts in mind, I select food for our household based on local sales, the clearance rack, my garden and my access to local farms. I also purchase organic grains in bulk quantities from some online sources.
To get started, write down your menus for a couple of weeks – this will help you to establish the pantry basics that you need.
How to shop on a budget
Next, start a “price book” – this is a vital tool. Without it, you can’t really be sure if that sale is really a sale at all. A price book is simply a notebook that you keep with you when shopping where you write down the price that you pay for certain items. You should always update your price book with the lowest price for these items. This is what allowed me to see that five years ago I paid $1.88 for peanut butter and these days the lowest price I can find is $5.99, like I mentioned above.
When you find a staple at a good price, purchase in as much quantity as you can afford and reasonably use before it expires. This will allow you to begin building your stockpile. After a couple of months of shopping in this manner, you’ll discover that you don’t actually “grocery shop” any more – you shop to replenish your stockpile.
Buy things you’ll want to eat
Items that you stockpile should be foods that you regularly consume. If you normally eat steak and potatoes, for example, but you fill your pantry with beans and rice, when the day comes that you are relying on that pantry you will suffer from food fatigue and you will also feel deprived. Start now by adjusting the food that you consume on a regular basis to foods that will be sustainable in a food storage pantry.
This doesn’t have to mean dull, bland canned food, by the way. Here are some books to give you great ideas:
- Prepper’s Pantry – This is my book on building a stockpile on a budget.
- The Prepper’s Cookbook: 365 Recipes to Turn Your Emergency Food into Nutritious, Delicious, Life-Saving Meals.
- The Prepper’s Canning Guide
- The Stockpile Cafe
- Prepper’s Dehydration Handbook
Learn to cook from scratch
If you don’t already know how to cook from scratch, it’s better to learn now, before it’s a necessity. You need to learn to cook with your standard supplies – for example, if you’ve never cooked beans from scratch before, it is not ideal to start out by trying to cook them over an open fire. Cooking with whole grains is quite a bit different than cooking food that comes from a box on the grocery store shelf.
- Here’s an article about cooking from scratch.
- Here’s an article about the scratch-cooking basics you should have on hand.
How all this stockpiling is cheaper than regular grocery shopping
Now, let’s take a moment to look at the math – and you’ll see why shopping for a pantry beats out weekly grocery shopping every time!
Beef:
I purchase my beef in bulk from a local butcher shop. They raise hormone-free meat, the cattle are grass-fed and the quality is superior. Because I purchase 1/4 of a cow each year, I’m able to get all of my beef at $3.99 per pound.
Compare this to the grocery stores: the best price this week for stewing beef was $4.99 per pound. The best price for ground beef was $2.99 per pound. The best price for roast was $9.99 per pound. When you average all of these together, I pay slightly more for ground beef and far less for everything else – as well – the quality is excellent and I’m avoiding the nasty chemicals and factory farming practices that taint the grocery store meat. The average grocery store price per pound, on sale, is $5.99
- Pantry method: $3.99 per pound
- Regular shopping method: $5.99 per pound
Now, let’s look at grains. I bought organic wheatberries at $17.04 for 22 pounds. The shipping was $21.78, bringing my total to $38.82, delivered to my door – or $1.76 per pound. I can’t get wheatberries at the local store. At the closest place I can find wheat berries, the cost in bulk is $2.60 per pound. Sure, I can buy a smaller amount, but purchasing that larger amount results in savings because of fewer trips to the store.
- Pantry method: $1.76 per pound
- Regular shopping method: $2.60 per pound
If you can do this with all of your staples, you can see the massive savings that can be achieved.
What do I buy?
Some of the things I buy in extremely large quantities are:
- Beef
- Sugar
- Wheat
- Cornmeal
- Oatmeal
- Coconut Oil
- Quinoa
- Beans
- Popcorn
- Tomatoes (these can be grown instead of purchased)
- Dry milk
I supplement these items with sale-purchased
- Organic veggies and fruit
- Farmer’s market veggies and fruit
- Baking essentials like soda, powder, etc
I also garden and forage. I rely highly on canning to preserve meat, fruit, and vegetables.
You can expand this principle to everything you buy.
Once you have the hang of it, you can apply this same pantry principle to nearly everything that you purchase: soap, shampoo, toilet paper, over the counter medications – anything that you can get in big quantities! Your pantry doesn’t stop at the kitchen. Use your theory of preppernomics to keep your household running smoothly on far less money!
Stock up and prepare for that rainy day that could be just around the corner. And if the rainy day never comes, you’ve saved time and money while providing healthy food for your family.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and runs a small digital publishing company. She lives in the mountains of Virginia with her family. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Daisy
I totally agree with this article. Things like buying larger quantities when on a deep sale absolutely save lots of money. This is why i think being debit free is perhaps the most important prep. Instead of a car payment you can buy a quarter or half of beef or pork.
Yes this is what we do shop to replenish the stockpile. It is really great to have what you need when you need it. It minimizes trips to the store. Makes such good sense
I also read the Tightwad stuff years ago and my shopping sounds pretty much just like yours! I thought the price book was kind of hokey but tried it anyway. Result: not only was it plain in black and white that my memory was pretty faulty, but by tracking which store had what for a great price when, I was able to see patterns in the sales. Example: I discovered 1 store had my favorite butter 30% off every 3 months. I bought enough butter to last 3 months (I froze some) and never again paid full price for butter until I moved away.
Working on ways to stockpile bulk supplies…Looking for web site to purchase different varieties of bulk dried beans. Shipping costs often eats into savings of bulk purchase. Any help out there?
Here’s a 50-lb bag with free shipping from Amazon if you have prime.
Absolutely agree with your article! It has taken a long time, but by the time we both retired, we pretty much now just shop to replenish the deep pantry.
Another benefit has been the ability to provide basic necessities for family when there was a job loss, medical emergency or financial crisis.
We also have been able to give household supplies, clothing and food to disaster relief efforts when Hurricane Michael devastated a neighboring county last year.
The interesting part about assisting others is that, while you are rotating your supplies you are also making friends with your “unrighteous riches” and thus more likely to receive assistance should YOU need it.
Meds DO expire, but if stored properly, most will not expire until well after their anniversary date. Few doctors will prescribe more than you might reasonably need because they are not the free agents we like to think of them as AND because insurance companies will not pay for the additional quantities.
If you can devise a method for reducing your consumption of a necessary + long term medication without harm to yourself AND continue refilling on schedule, you can still gradually acquire a stockpile. Keep the extra in your “go bag” so they don’t get overlooked in a hasty bug-out.
Keep a second bag just for OTC first aid supplies more useful in a group setting but keep your prescription meds in your direct control.
Don’t forget to include a few hard candies and / or some chewing gum … great morale boosters when life is tenuous and the horizon gray. They are small, so tuck them into the odd pocket or corner. Finding one later will brighten life considerably. Military MREs include them for precisely this purpose.
I agree–prepping can be an exercise in frugality. Well stocked pantry, saving, diversified income streams, etc. Prepping doesn’t need to break the bank by any means! In fact, by developing a prepper philosophy, you can better your financial situation over time. Thanks for sharing this–people definitely need to rid themselves of the “prepping is expensive” misconception.