Review: Costco’s Emergency Food Storage

Posted by Matt in July 11th, 2007

Costco sells a 23lb bucket of food for emergencies that’s called Emergency Food Storage. You can find information about this item at NutriStorage.Com. I bought one for about $100 from Costco the other day, and I wanted to review what I found.

Opening the bucket is very easy by clipping the strip that goes around the edge and pulling on it. When you open it up you will find the bucket stuffed with mylar packets. There’s also a large oxygen absorber in the bucket too. Most of the packets contain a meal of five servings. Generally you boil 5 to 7 cups of water, add mix and simmer for 20 minutes. You should let it cool for about 15 minutes to let it absorb the water properly. That’s it.

My wife and I tried the Ala King and Western Stew mixes. We didn’t like either mix. We really hated the Ala King mix. The Western Stew mix was better, but we weren’t particularly happy with it either. The mixes are too salty, and generally don’t taste that good. Although the Western Stew was a lot better than the Ala King. I wouldn’t want to live on this stuff for very long.

The mixes require a lot of water, and because they contain a lot of salt, you will need plenty of drinking water to go with the meal. All of this water could be a problem in a real emergency.

We didn’t try out the other mixes because we’re returning the remaining bucket to Costco.

So there you go. I can’t recommend the Costco Emergency Food Storage bucket for anything.

If you did want to purchase the Emergency Food Storage bucket then you probably should start thinking about water storage. This food requires a lot of water. How do you know that clean, fresh water will be available in a long-term emergency? You probably should purchase a couple of 55-gallon drums (plastic) for water storage too.

If you want food storage you should purchase MREs from Long Life Food. Their MREs are actually pretty good. I could live on that food for a long time. The only problem is that MREs are really expensive. I mean really, really expensive.

I personally own two 55-gallon drums of water. I have about 300 lbs of grain (hard white wheat and yellow corn) stored. I also have rice and beans stored. I have other stuff like powdered milk stored as well. Generally, I am well stocked for 30 days, but some of this is for experimental use.

My overall family storage plan is to have enough food for two years, and enough water storage for one year. I also plan to have enough water filtration equipment to last 20 years.

Here are a couple of articles that you might be interested in:

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