Calculating How Long Your Food Stockpile Will Last
To get the total number of days your stockpile will last, you need to take the:
Total calories in your stockpile ÷ Calories your family needs per day
Let’s start with the top half of the equation.
Calculating How Many Calories You Have
Ideally, your pantry is well organized, making the process much faster.
But if it’s not…perhaps this will allow you to do so…?!?
Because you’re about to take inventory.
Yup. Just like ALL successful retail businesses do regularly.
Now you may ask, “Should I count EVERYTHING” on my shelves?
If it’s shelf stable and you replace it regularly, then YES, count it.
Sure, some items will fluctuate as you use them up and then buy more.
But a snapshot of the shelf life stable calories in your pantry is “close enough” …
Obviously count all freeze-dried foods, MREs, canned meats, and #10 Cans.
Also, don’t count ANY calories in your refrigerator or freezer.
Power outages make freezers highly vulnerable disaster appliances.
The only exception is if you have a robust backup energy plan or you are already living off the grid.
A robust backup energy plan means having a Power station (or a generator with a few weeks of fuel).
Otherwise, I DON’T count your refrigerated and frozen goods.
I used a simple spreadsheet for this to help make the calculations easy. Plus, I can sort and filter as needed later with a spreadsheet.
Start by making a few columns titled:
- Food – Brand
- Number of items (pouches, bags, containers)
- Servings Per Container
- Calories per Serving
- Total Calories
Once you fill out an entire row with that info, multiply the “number of items” by the “servings per container” by the “calories per serving.”
This will give you the number of calories you have in your inventory for THAT specific food item.
Now, you need to be careful here.
I added the Brand to the first column because not ALL brands use the same servings/calorie info.
For example:
Separate Brands of canned beans may seem identical but often are not.
The difference can add up, especially if you have a lot of dried beans…
Now, IF the foods are the same, AND the info per serving is the same, you can put them in the same line.
Otherwise, if any of those numbers are different, add a new line item.
Now keep going and inventory everything that makes sense for you.
Once done, you should add up all the calories.
And now you know exactly how much non-perishable food you currently have.
This calorie number may seem massive if you’ve got a decent-sized stockpile.
Perhaps even a few hundred thousand calories, like 358,753 or something like that.
WOW. Massive, right? Not so fast…
Having your total calories may seem like an important number to know, but it’s not all that helpful…yet.
Why? Because it’s relative to the size of your family, right?
For example, 358,753 calories is a stellar long term food storage for a retired couple of 2.
But what about a growing family of 5? Not so much.
That’s why we need to figure out how many calories YOUR family consumes each day…
How Many Calories Does Your Family Need Per Day?
At first, this may seem like a difficult task, but with the proper tools, it’s easy.
You must figure out how many replacement calories each family member needs daily.
- And this is NOT the same for males and females.
- It’s also NOT the same for babies, kids, young adults, adults, or mature adults.
- And it’s NOT the same for those who live an active or sedentary lifestyle.
You need to consider ALL 3 of these variables to make an educated guess.
The good news is I created a simple chart to do just THAT.
You can use this chart to determine your sex, age, and activity level for each family member.
Then add up each number.
The TOTAL is how many calories you’re family needs per day.
Now, THIS is a very good number to know!
This is the number you need to figure out how long your food stockpile will last.
Your Final Calculation
Take your total calories and divide by your family’s daily calorie requirement.
Viola! THAT new number is a very good approximation of How Long Your Current Food Stockpile Will Last.
Perhaps your number is 58.63 days?
That means you’re very close to having 2 months’ worth of food in your emergency stockpile.
Now, of course, you may be able to ration those calories a bit in a longer-term emergency.
But I don’t recommend “rationing” your calculation.
Why? Because I’d rather underestimate the duration of my stockpile by a few days and NOT the other way around.
Said another way, I’d rather be pleasantly surprised…
You now know how long you have before starvation begins after the grocery store shelves go bare.
