As we decided to produce more food at home we wanted to tap into the economies of scale to do so. As a general rule, the more you buy in bulk, the lower the cost. This correlates with the fewer trips for groceries, the more time we also save. The inverse of those is, that the more you have that you don’t use, the more you throw away due to spoilage. In this post, we will talk about ways to balance buying in bulk vs keeping too much on hand.
Impulse Buying Wasn’t The Answer
First, we will talk about what we did wrong that we learned the hard way. We found is there was no ‘easy’ button to help new cooks create a pantry of items they need. We had hoped we could find a series of top 20 lists of what people stocked in their short, mid, and long-term storage. The more we searched we could find some here and there but nothing that fit us. There wasn’t one and for good reason. The reason is because everyone has different calorie budgets, family sizes, tastes, etc. It was the same problem with understanding portion sizes.
When we started, I decided to go all in. In my mind, I came up with all the things I wanted to make and started buying and storing them. That includes things like cake flour, multiple types of dried fruit for granola bars, four types of pasta noodles, and multiple cans of tuna. It was a big mistake. I, realized, well, I have only baked one cake in my life. It wasn’t like we were packing for the Oregon Trail where there wouldn’t be any grocery store for the next 2,000+ miles. It was a wastefully impulsive way to start but it did create change.
Impulse did Enforce a Change
While it did force us to cook more at home to use up what I had bought. This helped us start to produce more at home. there are better ways to approach this. We learned we had to think about food from a storage point of view. It also made us realize just how many meals we needed to keep on hand and didn’t. Out of our experiments, we realized that our food had to be segmented by usage time.
Breaking It Down Isn’t Hard
What we wanted to have on hand:
- Fresh items to use within 5-10 days. These include meats, dairy, vegetables, etc. These are your most perishable items. They are all ingredients in the meals we intend to prepare.
- Intermediate life items that we needed on hand to create meals. These items we wanted to use up in 2 weeks to 3 months. The items range from cheeses to condiments like mayonnaise as well as pre-cooked frozen chicken.
- Intermediate life items were fresh homemade meal substitutes such as canned chili, soups, and frozen pizzas. These are the buffer foods that keep us from going out by giving us something quick that is on hand when life goes sideways.
- Long-life items that will last up to a year such as condiments such as ketchup to items such as flour, sugar, and salt. In this category also go bulk spices, and dried meals such as macaroni and cheese.
Notice nothing on this list has anything to do with extra portions or meals we made ourselves. To produce meals or augment meals we needed these ingredients which we considered staples. Meals and shelf-stable items like home canned goods are another part of the items we keep on hand but are complex enough to need their own write-up.
Getting to the right mix:
We can’t tell you what will work for you. That is a function of how much space you have, how much you cook, and what you make the most of. We can give you two rubrics to help you decide how much to store and what.
- The more you have on hand the more you will be able to make.
- The longer an item is stored the less likely it will be used.
It is the second bullet point that is the gotcha. We are not homesteaders or preppers. Our goal was not a year’s or more worth of food on hand. Shelf-stable foods such as Mac and Cheese (Boxed Dinners) and canned soups can be stored for a year or more. Due to this extended shelf life, there was never pressure to use them before they spoiled. We had to learn to enforce our own rules to use them within 2-3 months of purchase.
Getting Started is Easy:
You are probably already doing much of the leg work to do this. Yes, that’s correct, it’s your weekly shopping list. By adding a couple more intentional aspects to it, you can take advantage of the work you are already doing. Here’s an approach we eventually found worked and what didn’t.
Things that help:
- Identify what staples are for your calorie budget, portions, and cooking needs. It will be the items you are buying most frequently.
- Think of at least two or three uses for something before you buy in quantity. An example of this is flour tortillas. Tortillas are a blank slate that can be used as a wrap, baked as a cracker, or even made as a quick quesadilla.
- Remember staples include all types of food from condiments like ketchup and mustard to pre-packaged meals such as soup.
- Choose package sizes to fit your needs but also your space. We bake all the time but we will never buy a 10 lb sack of flour even though we may go through all of it before it goes bad. This is simply a trade-off for storage space.
- Staples also includes items that give you flexibility. Having frozen vegetables, fruits, or even frozen pre-cooked chicken on hand gives you easy ways to augment meals and dishes on an as-needed basis.
- Only buy two to three types of things in categories such as rice and pasta until you start to run out of them. Most of us don’t need extensive supplies of different noodles such as Spaghetti, Fettuccine, Elbows, Shells, etc. Having two or three on hand leaves a lot of creativity while keeping storage space maximized.
Things that didn’t help:
- Buying food out of cooking ideas that aren’t actionable. It is very easy to think you will use a more exotic item but we have found, until you see it on the grocery list a couple of times, it’s probably not a staple.
- Using sale prices as the only motivator to increase the amount you buy may or may not produce the desired outcome. Sales come and go but what is in your fridge or pantry has a date and is taking up space.
- Overstocking of staples can lead to accidentally hiding items. This problem leads to buying more of the items you already have and don’t need.
- Staples mean things you use over and over again. These are not items to buy in quantity if you are not sure how much you will like them.
Wrapping Up
In this post, we have discussed how to start planning for a pantry and storage for staples. By watching your grocery list you can start to fill out what are staples for you. Once your staples are identified you can start purchasing items in bulk and take advantage of economies of scale. As discussed, this will also help eliminate waste on guessing what will work versus knowing what you use all the time. We will follow up this post with some thoughts on those economies of scale at a later date.