When it comes to prepping and disaster preparedness, there are a vast array of food storage options available – Everything from complete meals that even include a way to cook them (like MREs) to raw grains that you’ve sealed in buckets. In the middle are the the various options of meals and ingredients packaged in a way that they should last anywhere from 15 to 30 years.

Whichever of these many options is best for you depends on your prepping mission statement, your preferences, and your logistics. The biggest logistical constraint for most preppers is money. buy 3, 6, 12 or more worth of food at once is expensive. When it’s specially packaged to last for 20 years its even MORE expensive, so finding an affordable long term food storage option is important for many people to be able to be prepared. MRE’s routinely cost $7 to $10 each, which is just too much money to most people to spend to store months worth of food.

The absolute cheapest option is always going to be packaging food for storage at home. Buy dry goods in bulk and use mylar bags, and oxygen absorbers to put it in food grade buckets. If done properly you can store foods like rice, beans, and wheat, for over 20 years.

I’ve done this before and plan to do some more in the future, but it can be a little overwhelming for some people, and if you aren’t confident that you stored the food properly then you will have some apprehension that the food might not really still be good when if have to open it up and eat it years later.

This concern, and an ability to have a lot more variety and more complex meals, leads many preppers to buy commercially packaged long term foods for their disaster readiness supplies. This is what I prefer to do for most of my food storage, and I wanted to know which is the cheapest of good quality (not necessarily the absolute cheapest)

After looking around quite a bit I’ve settled on Legacy Foods for my preps, for a few reasons:

They don’t appear to be cheaper if you compare a seemingly similar kit from other companies (like a 3 or 6 month supply), until you compare by actual calories, or pounds of food. Many food storage companies try to trick you with absurdly small ‘servings’, to trick you into thinking there is more there than there really is. Lots of these plans, if you really divide them by the number of days in the time period they are supposed to cover, only offer 800 or 1000 calories a day!

That’s enough to keep you alive if you are just sitting on the couch, but in a serious SHTF scenario it is NOT enough to stay healthy and effective. You would most likely be forced to eat multiple servings, and your 6 month supply would turn into a 4 month supply or less very quickly. Personally I would not want to deal with a company that tries to trick me either. What other shady practices are they doing?

I chose Legacy because they have about 50% more calories per serving than many of the other major brands, more 2000 calorie days per in their plans, and are still cheaper per calorie. Add their 25yr shelf life and it was pretty much a no-brainer for me.

The meal choices are adequate, and I’ve started to sample a few of them, starting with the pancakes (watch that video HERE). Their food doesn’t have resealable ziploc-type pouches, which they’ve left out to make it even cheaper. Not a big problem since there are only a few servings per pouch, but its something to consider, especially if you are storing just for one person and it might take you longer to finish a whole pouch.

I don’t typically eat a lot of pasta, beans, and dishes like that in my normal life, but they are cheap sources of calories that all store well, so it is nearly impossible to avoid these foods unless you want to spend a fortune on your preps. I don’t plan to use the food unless there is an emergency anyway, so its not a problem. I would be more than happy to dig into a big plate of paste if the SHTF.

I will make an in depth videos in the future about how to store your own staples long term, so sign up for my email list to get notified. If you want commercially packaged long-term storage, I can recommend Legacy Foods.