Starting the New Year - Rounding out Food Storage

The New Year is a great time to do a full inventory of your Food Storage - especially your rotating day to day storage - to make sure you know what you have. By doing this you’re able to make a list of things you need to get to re-stock everything and start the year with a fully year’s supply of food. We recently finished doing this at my house and I thought I would share some of the results with you. It’s pretty much impossible to easily show you what a years supply of food looks like due to storage and other issues. The following pictures are not of my long term storage, they’re of my rotating storage that we eat from every day. Once a month we glance through our storage areas and make notes of what has been depleted. As a general rule, I buy twice what is needed to replenish used stock. In this way we are constantly growing our supply and adding to the amount of time it can support us. We have about 8 - 9 months of regular food on hand given normal eating routines. To start the New Year we did a full inventory and then spent several hours shopping to get full replenishment (and then some) for all the food items we store. As you can tell in the pictures, we store more than just food. We’ll be rounding out several non-food items in the next few weeks as well. As you can see above, our main store room has several shelves and quite a bit of food - what you don’t see is that we have a big pantry upstairs that is full as well as several other storage areas. Here is a better view of some of the shelves in our store room: And a couple of our freezers: The Cereal/Chips Pantry: You can see in this last picture that we still need to replenish the cereal/chips closet a bit - thing is, we bought everything they had at the store :) We’ll get more when they do. This closet was re-stocked by my younger children as well, I need to go through and straighten it back up :) If your storage isn’t far enough along to be able to just make a list and go buy everything, at least go through what you have and work with your master list to make a list of what you need! Now is the perfect time to make a little effort to make sure you have a list to work from this year. Trust me, there is great satisfaction in looking at a fully crossed off list, and then looking at what you built from it.