How to Build Your Home Grocery Store

What if your food storage pantry functioned like a grocery store?

In this episode, we're talking about layer two of my three-layer food storage system: your home grocery store. This short-term storage layer is made up of the foods your family already eats and uses on a regular basis. The goal isn't to buy a year's worth of random food. It's to intentionally build a working pantry that saves money, reduces waste, and makes everyday life easier.

We talk about:
• What layer two food storage actually is
• Why I think of this layer as my home grocery store
• What foods belong in layer two
• How to determine how much food your family actually needs
• Simple packaging and storage ideas
• How to rotate food from your grocery store into your kitchen
• How this layer can save you money on groceries

If you've ever wondered how to build a food storage system that works for real life, this episode will help you take the next step.

Preparedness doesn't happen overnight. It is slow and steady work, and it adds up faster than you think.

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Transcript

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Today we are talking about layer two of my three-layer food storage system. To recap, there are three layers in my food storage system. Layer one is your kitchen pantry. If you missed the episode about layer one, go ahead and go back and listen to that one. You are not going to want to miss it. Layer two is what we are discussing today, and this is your short-term layer. You will also hear me refer to it as your grocery store. And layer three of the three-layer food storage system is your long-term storage. You will also hear me call that. This is my something really bad has happened layer. Layer two of your food storage is the layer that, if done correctly, is going to save you the most money in your food storage. Budget is important for all of us. I don't know anybody who just has an unlimited amount of money to throw at their food storage. We are all on a budget. We all need to be mindful of what we spend our funds on, how we are spending our funds. And when we have a food storage system that creates waste, we are essentially throwing money down the drain. So today we're going to talk about layer two. We're going to talk about what is layer two, what you should store in layer two, how to rotate these foods into your kitchen, and how this layer can save you money. I can't keep a year's worth of food in my layer two. And we're going to talk about this a little later because that can just feel so overwhelming when you hear that. So what is layer two? Layer two in my food storage system are the foods that we are going to be eating within the next year. These are the foods that are in our freezers. They're dry goods that I store strayed in buckets that I am using to refill my kitchen canisters. It's the home canned food that I preserve when it's in season. It's the strawberry jam that I make during strawberry season or the peaches that I can during peach season. It's my home-canned pantry shelves. It's canned goods. Pretty much anything you keep in your kitchen, you are also going to keep in your layer two grocery store. When I plan layer two, I plan for these foods to be eaten within one year or by their packaged expiration date. You don't generally have to get those foods eaten within the year because some of them will store longer. But it is important to rotate your layer two foods in through your kitchen to maximize nutritional content, to prevent waste, which again is gonna save you money. Layer two in my pantry consists of dry goods, it's bulk buckets of flour, it's oats, rice, beans, things that my family actually eats. It's canned food. It's canned meat, canned fruit, canned vegetables, and that can be commercially canned, or like I mentioned earlier, home canned foods. It's frozen foods. We'll oftentimes raise our own chickens. So it's the poultry that we raise for the year, or it's the beef cow that we buy for the year. It's foods that I am buying on sale and storing in our freezer, like butter or frozen vegetables and fruits, berries, things like that. How much you should keep in your layer two storage is a question I get a lot. And I suggest one year's worth of the food that you eat on a regular basis in your home grocery store. I know that is so overwhelming. My tip for that overwhelm is to break it down into smaller pieces. If you take one food ingredient, and I'm gonna use ketchup as an example, I buy ketchup at Costco, big bottles. So we probably go through one bottle of ketchup every three months. That means a year's worth of ketchup is only four bottles of ketchup. Breaking that into smaller chunks is gonna make it more manageable for your budget, for your storage space, and also for your brain and the overwhelm that comes when you hear a year's worth of food. Look through your kitchen, make a list of what do you use to make the recipes and start tracking how often and how much of those do you actually use. And that's gonna help you come up with that one-year goal and how much that's gonna be. Packaging is another important part of your layer two food storage. In the episode about layer one, we discussed that in layer one, you don't need to repackage that food. You're gonna be eating it, it's feeding your family, so don't waste your time. Layer two foods are a little bit different. You do not need to use mylar. You can, but you don't have to in your layer two pantry. And I do not use mylar in my layer two pantry. I choose to save mylar for layer three, which is coming up in another episode, so stay tuned for that. I just don't want the expense or the time and energy I have to spend mylaring food that I know I'm gonna open within the year. Packaging for layer two can look like foods kept in their original packaging, and maybe you're putting that into storage bins or totes. It can look like pouring bulk bags of oats or rice or beans or flour straight into buckets. You can put oxygen absorbers in those, close the lid, and then you know that they will be protected until you're ready to open that bucket. In my basement, creepy basement, I have what I call my working pantry area. This is where buckets that I have opened live. I will go down there once a month when I restock my kitchen. I will refill my canister of flour, sugar, rice, whatever it is, from those buckets. And when those buckets are empty, I know I need to buy a new one to replace what was used out of my layer two pantries. But it's just constantly on a rotation. Buckets, storage bins, original packaging. You can also use jars. Any other airtight storage container is great for your layer two pantry. Everything in your layer two pantry is feeding your kitchen. Layer one, we talked about in that episode that layer one feeds your family. Well, layer two feeds your kitchen. As you eat through layer one, you are restocking your kitchen. That's gonna happen on whatever time frame works for the space you have in your kitchen. I do that monthly. You're gonna go to your layer two pantry to restock your kitchen. I will typically open up all my cabinets, I make a list of, oh, I need flour, I need rice, I need these spices, and then I head down to layer two, I fill up my basket or whatever I've brought with me, restock my kitchen, and then anything that I removed from my layer two pantry from my grocery store gets repurchased. I rotate those items first in, first out to prevent waste, to maximize nutritional content, and I've restocked my layer two pantry. How does your layer two pantry save you money in your grocery budget, in your food storage? And it does that in a couple different ways. One by always having one extra at minimum, one extra. You're not running out of items when you're in the middle of a recipe or cooking or needing to make something and having to run to the grocery store right then. It's saving you time and energy, but it's also saving you gas money. It allows you to purchase foods when they're on sale. You get to now monitor store sales cycles and know I need to restock flour in my short-term layer. And we know flour goes on sale at the holidays. Baking supplies go on sale at the holidays, so that is a great time to restock your baking supplies and your flour. It also allows you to buy in bulk, which is usually cheaper per unit cost. That is gonna allow you to only buy things when it is at the price that you want to pay for an item. As we talked about in the episode of layer one, I always suggest that you start with your layer one kitchen pantry because the majority of the emergencies we are going to face, we're gonna feed our families out of our kitchen pantry. We're not running to that bucket of emergency foods. Getting started in layer two is also important. So here are some steps that you can take to get started building your layer two pantry. Make a list of meals that your family eats on a regular basis. In addition to the list of recipes or meals, you're gonna want to write down all the ingredients. What are the ingredients? Are they oats or fruit? Is it canned meat? Is it beans, rice? What are the ingredients that you're using to make those foods? Those are the things that you're gonna keep in your layer two pantry. The next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna track how much of that item do you actually use. This is where what we talked about earlier comes in handy of knowing how many do you use in a year or how long does it take you to go through that bottle of ketchup. Start keeping track in a month of everything you use or a three-month period of time because that is gonna help you plan out how much do I need to keep in my layer two pantry and my grocery store. That is a long process. It takes a while to really get the hang of how much you want to store. So make sure that you are stocking your pantry while you're doing that planning. You don't have to plan first and stock later because you can't eat your plan. You can't eat the food that you're purchasing. If you know your family already eats those things, go ahead and purchase them and you'll work them into your plan later. The next step that you can take to keep your layer two pantry stocked and getting started on that is to start learning what your local store sales cycles are. Learn what is in season when, what might you want to learn to can or preserve at different times of year, when do certain things go on sale, and start noting that because that's when you're gonna want to buy a larger quantity of those items. And then one of the most important parts of your layer two pantry is that you are using it to restock your kitchen. This is kind of a step away from what we traditionally think of when we think of grocery shopping. We're not making a grocery list and going to the grocery store to refill our kitchen cabinets every week or every month. Instead, we are making a list of what we took from our grocery store and replacing that every month. So it's very important that you are rotating that first in, first out, which you will often see written as F-I-F-O. So first in, first out rotation. And that can be as simple as writing the expiration dates on cans and bottles and stacking them on your shelf in order. Or when you buy a new one, you put it at the back. It doesn't have to be a huge system of rotation, just it's you knowing how you use your kitchen, how you stock your pantry, and how best your brain is gonna understand which item was new and which item is the oldest that you need to use first. As you get started stocking your home grocery store, at this point, maybe you are already done stocking your 30-day kitchen pantry. You are ready to jump into planning and stocking your home grocery store. I want you to remember that preparedness is not mad rushing the grocery store. It is slow and steady work, and it is gonna add up a lot faster than you think. Give yourself a budget for how much you want to spend on your home grocery store each month, shop those sales cycles, or it can be as simple as buy one extra. Go through your recipes, come up with a plan, and be intentional about where you are spending your time, your money, and your effort. I hope this episode helped you understand what layer two of the three-layer food storage system is and has given you some action steps to get started building your own home grocery store. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and help other women find this Prepared Life podcast, where together we're building a calmer, more resilient life, one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time. Thanks for listening.