If you have been interested in Prepping for more than two minutes, you have heard that you need to have a plan for food storage in case of disaster. Food is one of the most important items preppers can obtain that will keep them alive but so many people do not have more than a few days of food in their pantries at home. For this reason, a food storage calculator spreadsheet could help you prepare.
We shop for food often and buying extra food isn’t viewed as odd or deviant (yet?) like some prepper purchases but for one reason or another most people only keep the basics on hand and believe that if needed they will just run to the grocery store to pick up last-minute items. Unfortunately, you have all seen photos of shelves stripped bare at the first mention of an approaching storm.
What if your city was impacted by the recent earthquake? This one was relatively minor, but if there had been more damage, would you have enough food to last until service was restored and the grocery store replenished? What if there was an Ebola outbreak and you were forced to stay in your home for a month. Would you have enough food to last or would you travel out possibly risking exposure?
Ensuring you have a food storage plan is one way to prevent your family from being the ones running down the grocery store isles searching for anything still left. Actually, when we have inclement weather it never fails that my wife will ask me to stop by the store on my way home. It isn’t that we need any food because we have stocked up plenty to last several months at a minimum. No, she wants me to get single items for a recipe or one ingredient that she might need in a few days. I swear it’s just to hear me complain about the lines in the stores of all the panicked people looking to stock up before whatever event we have coming (usually a snowstorm) hits us.
How can the food storage calculator spreadsheet help you?
You shouldn’t need to go to the store for last-minute food items because you too should have several months of food that your family will eat stored already. A good food storage plan will help you figure out what you need and inventory those supplies.
The first step is to understand what you need in terms of the specific foods and there are lots of websites with a food storage calculator out there that will help but you can’t really customize them. You are forced into taking their food recommendations.
I have taken the liberty of creating my own food storage calculator spreadsheet for the readers of the prepper journal. The advantage of this one is that you can play around with the quantities and even add new items to your list and adjust the numbers of people and duration you want to have food stored for.
The spreadsheet is open and free for you to use. If you don’t want to store Pearled Barley, just change the food storage calculator spreadsheet to something you do like to eat. Want to keep track of your canned spaghetti sauce? Just add it to the sheet! The only requirement is that you need to be able to open and manipulate an Excel file.
All you have to do is to enter the number of people you are stocking up food for, then the number of months you want to have stored. It isn’t fancy, but it is a simple tool you can download and use to calculate your own food storage in your home.
The spreadsheet will give you the average recommended quantities of food and you can add how much you have on-hand. Once that is done, the spreadsheet will let you know how much of any particular item you still need to purchase. You can use this to generate your shopping list and Boom! You will be on your way to securing your family’s food needs for the next disaster. You can download the free food storage calculator spreadsheet right here.
If this is helpful, we also have a free Ammo Inventory spreadsheet that you can download, add to this one and keep track of multiple supplies on one spreadsheet.
I hope this helps. If you see anything I missed or have questions/comments/recommendations please let me know.