One of the puzzles for people starting out in the business of being prepared is “How much?” How much sugar, flour, rice . . . do I need to have on hand? There are lots of sources that will provide planning figures for this, and in the absence of any other guidance, following them – at least partially at first – is a good idea. I did so. But these one-size-fits-all guides, as useful as they are, may not reflect your specific tastes and usages. Here is a method for arriving at a figure somewhat associated with your needs – based on your usage rates of the stuff you use.
A brief aside: During my Army career, I went to several schools. In the Army logistics planning system there were books (this was a while ago) with reference tables showing how many rounds of various kinds of ammunition or supplies to anticipate needing for a certain period of combat, with several levels of intensity shown in the tables. To make large-scale logistics plans, one would add up the number of type units (infantry, armor, or truck companies, or artillery batteries), and multiply by the usage factor from the table and time anticipated; if the table had a factor based on one week, multiply by the number of weeks anticipated. Note that each type of unit was a separate math problem: M1 Tank companies’ requirements were different, even in food, from those of M2 Bradley mech infantry companies or even M2 Bradley cavalry troops.
It was never made clear, but I interpreted this planning data as having come from real usage figures in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, with adjustments as new weapon systems came into use. No doubt, our more recent sojourns into the Middle East and Southwest Asia have led to updates. So, to make plans on how much one may need, starting with hard data on how much one uses/used in past events is a realistic beginning. End of this aside.
Here is my recommendation for a – not the – method for starting planning. YMMV, and you may find something else/a modification that works better for you.
Step One: Get some stuff on hand you know you will use, because it is something that you already use. As others have said, buy two or three of whatever you are getting when you shop, assuming that what you are getting will store. Keep stocking up as you go on.
Step Two: Get a method to record when you open a new container of whatever it is you are tracking. It needs to be simple to use, or it won’t be used. I have 5″x8″ cards taped to the inside of a kitchen cabinet. Whenever I open a new container (can of coffee, bag of flour, box of kosher salt, jar of honey . . . ), I put the date on the appropriate card. I only have three cards going, with multiple items on each card. Pay attention to the sizes of packages. If you standardize the packages you buy – always buying the same size bag of flour, for example – this will avoid an unnecessary complication.
I tried a couple of different ways to track usage. This “date opened” is the easiest to maintain. But you have to get obsessive about making the date entries. I haven’t added another step, but as this goes on, and after you are comfortable recording the data on this small number or items, start adding some of the less-frequently opened – but important to track – items to your cards.
Step Three: After six months or so (or at least waiting until you have opened three or four of the packages concerned), transcribe your start and end dates, and the number/pounds/kilos of each type supply being tracked and do the math. From this data you can get a first draft of usage rates, learning, for example, that one container of honey lasts about a month, or that five pounds of flour lasts about two and a half weeks. (I bake a lot of sourdough bread – a thing I strongly recommend learning how to do. It’s easier and more forgiving than any of the books I consulted made it sound. Thinking about submitting an entry about that.) When I am figuring out a usage rate, I make the calculation to get an answer of “X units lasted Y days.” I can then convert the “days” figure to weeks, months, or years, as appropriate.
Step Four: Take a look at what you have on hand v. what your first-run usage rate is for that type item. Don’t go nuts, but you may want to adjust purchase amounts.
Step Five: Keep the cards going. The longer that you are recording this data, the more accurate it will be for establishing an actual usage rate. As an example, I use a lot of honey when I make granola. But I don’t make granola all that often.
When a card gets too full, I will start a new card. The top entry on the new card has the start and end dates of the previous card, and the total (packages/pounds/kilos) of that asset opened during that time period. This is a good time to look at your inventory to see how long you could get by with your current supply. Having an accurate baseline of usage rates, you can make larger purchases with a bit more comfort in knowing how much time that fifty pounds of flour represents.
If you screw up and miss recording several dates, and have no idea how to reconcile your known consumption with the data record on the card(s), don’t worry. I have done this – got fired up with drinking a hoity-toity dark roast coffee, and several other types. Completely lost track of/screwed up the data on coffee. Once I came to my senses, I simply capped that data stream and started anew. I underlined the range of dates on the new card put in the complete number of cans opened during that date range to the right of that entry, and restarted that data stream. Perfection is not the goal; an accurate usage rate is.
Step Six: If you weren’t already doing so, rotate your stock, using the oldest first. Although this is something everyone should do all the time, it becomes more significant as one’s inventory becomes more substantial. I am not going to go off on a tangent about whether or not any given item is still edible or nutritious after its “expiration” or “use by” or “best by” dates. But using the older stuff first simply makes sense.
However, keeping track of which is the oldest of the cans of coffee or jars of peanut butter by trying to read the cryptic code printed in tiny font using nearly invisible ink in hard-to-find places is a pain. Here’s my own code method for that: Similar to the “date opened” entry on my 5×8 cards, I put a two-letter “year and month purchased” code on the exterior packages. I had been using actual dates, but that got cumbersome when I was writing the dates I had made jams and jellies on each of the mason jar lids after the jams and jellies had been canned. So, to save time and space, I came up with a two-letter code. I started in 2021. Anything I bought (or canned) in that year had the first letter of A. The second letter in the code corresponds to the month, A for January through L for December. Anything I bought in January of 2022 was tagged BA. This date code works for me, making sorting by date purchased much easier. When I go to pull a can of coffee, I open the AK-tagged can, and leave the BA can until later.
This dating system is much easier to explain to people than Julian dates, plus, for most things, the actual day is not all that important. (I do add a number suffix of 1 – 31 on those things for which I want to distinguish the day upon which something happened; for me, it only matters in dating my jams. If one batch goes bad, I want to know which jars were in that batch; only making one batch a day means that the day suffix is all I need). I have used Julian dates, both during my time as a Battalion S4, and in reading the dates on products I bought at the “local” Bishop’s Storehouse – the home storage foodstuff outlet for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I used “local” since it’s an hour and a half away. They are worth a visit, if not too far away.
This started with food, for me. It can easily be exported to other types of supplies. I now use this code system on everything that has an expiration date, or for which, in my opinion, degrades over time – my latest addition to this was AA and AAA batteries.
Some notes:
Don’t be an absolutist, letting the Best be the enemy of Good Enough. Getting started is key. If you miss a date opened entry, make a guesstimate entry and keep going. If your data stream gets interrupted, note the appropriate dates and start a new one, as I described above.
Start small. Don’t try to track everything at first. You have to train yourself to make these entries, so start with an item that is stored in the cabinet where the cards are taped. I started with coffee and honey (I use it in my coffee), which are in that cabinet with the cards. I added things a bit at a time, and I am still adding things to be tracked.
I also recommend starting this tracking with something that you go through fast enough/ open packages often enough to help train yourself to make the date entries.
These usage rates are based on the specific people living with you while you are tracking your usage. If, after all of this is complete, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Bob and their four teenagers show up needing succor during a blizzard or a period of SHTF, the pasta you thought would last a year won’t.
Even if it is only your established household that may have to deal with a stressful period, the stress will affect usage rates. Read other contributors’ entries on this blog about their experiences during blackouts/blizzards/earthquakes. You may need more comfort/light nutrition food (like chicken or tomato soup, or tea or coffee). My wife leans toward chicken soup in times of stress, even though she doesn’t eat that much chicken soup at other times. This is particularly true when someone is ill. They may want things then that they usually won’t touch – and that you don’t have because they usually won’t touch it. If you know of an item or items likely to be needed by this person (or yourself) in times of stress, plan accordingly. This is like some of those first aid kit items that we have: don’t expect, and really don’t want to have a need to use them, but . . . not any alternatives – and the results of not having them will probably be ugly.
Holidays can distort usage rates with temporary blips, both because you may be making things that you rarely make, and because you may be feeding more people than you usually do; alternately, if you spend a week with Aunt Ethel and Uncle Bob at their house, your apparent consumption will be lowered, at least as far as the 5×8 cards’ data is concerned. A longer data record will even out these kinds of blips. Keep that in mind if your data record is still short.
Once your household’s stockage needs are being met (or relatively close to being met), you may want to start thinking about if and how much you might want to have on hand to give to people in need. Giving away hard-to-find or valuable resources in a time of crisis is in and of itself a security issue; other writers have counseled using third parties, like churches, to do so. That is much safer than giving things out from your home. But even before that, if you don’t know how fast you will use anything yourself, you won’t know if you have enough to spare.
Based on the information in notes 4 – 7, round up when buying. Having more than you need beats running out of something sooner than you thought you would.
Review inventory and rates every so often. One benefit that may take a while to show up, and for which you need to be alert, is the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” In Doyle’s story from which that quote came, the dog’s silence was significant. Here I am referring to stuff that you don’t have a record of opening, and therefore don’t need, or at least don’t need as much as you thought. For us, it was dry beans. We ate a lot of bean soup and beans in stew and chili when our kids were growing up. In starting to establish a stockpile quite some time ago, I put a lot of dry beans in vacuum-packed Mason jars. (Not cooked; I used a Harbor Freight Brake Bleeder manually-operated vacuum pump.) Now that I have this hard data on usage, I can – and have – cut back on the amount of dry beans on hand.
This doesn’t address water. My usual source of water is the tap, supplied by a local non-municipal water company that draws from a large local reservoir. Unless you already use water supplied in containers in your daily life (in which case this system can work), or have a rock-solid guaranteed source, like your own well, I would use the published rates for stocking water. I do; the two of us have about a month’s supply stored.
I am working on a second month’s supply, as well as setting up a rainfall collection system, and I have bleach and filters and know where to find unpurified sources that are within walking distance. And even if you have a rock-solid dependable source, I would stock some water. Kinda like those odd first aid items; not any alternatives.
I hope that these simple tips can help if someone needed a way to calculate his or her family’s actual usage rate for certain items – or to make rotating stock easier. There is comfort in knowing how long one’s family could be secure with what is on hand.