The simple answer: store about 2,000 calories per person per day, then multiply by the number of people and the number of days you want to cover.
That’s it. Everything else in this guide is just turning that one number into pounds of rice, cans of beans, and gallons of water. I’ve built our family store up over a few years, made most of the rookie mistakes, and the biggest one was thinking in “cans” instead of calories. Let me show you how to do it right.
Why Calories Beat “Number of Cans”
Most people start by counting items. “I’ve got 30 cans of soup and a few boxes of pasta, I’m probably fine for a couple weeks.” Then they actually do the math and find out 30 cans of soup is maybe 5,000 calories total. That’s two and a half days for one adult, not two weeks.
Food does one job in an emergency: it keeps a body running. A body runs on calories. So the only honest way to measure a food store is in calories, not in shelf space or item count.
The planning figure I use is 2,000 calories per person per day. It’s a round, well-established baseline. Some people need more (active adults, larger bodies, cold climates), some need less (small kids, sedentary seniors), and I’ll cover those adjustments later. But 2,000 is the number you plan around.
From there the formula is dead simple:
Calories per day x number of people x number of days = total calories to store
A family of four for two weeks is 2,000 x 4 x 14 = 112,000 calories. Once you have that target number, you fill it with whatever calorie-dense, shelf-stable food you’ll actually eat.
Why Calorie-Dense Staples Do the Heavy Lifting
Here’s the thing that makes storage affordable: a small number of cheap, dense staples carry most of the calories. Rough per-pound numbers, rounded:
| Staple | Calories per pound (approx) |
|---|---|
| White rice (dry) | ~1,650 |
| Dried beans / lentils | ~1,550 |
| Rolled oats | ~1,700 |
| Pasta (dry) | ~1,650 |
| Flour | ~1,650 |
| Cooking oil | ~4,000 |
| Sugar | ~1,750 |
| Peanut butter | ~2,600 |
Oil and peanut butter are the secret weapons. A single bottle of cooking oil holds more calories than 5 pounds of canned vegetables. That’s why the classic long-term plans always include a big fats allotment.
Food Storage Tiers (What “How Long” Really Means)
Don’t try to jump straight to a year. Build in tiers and stop wherever makes sense for your situation. Here’s how I think about each one.
| Tier | Covers | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| 3-day | A storm, a power outage, being stuck home | Everyone. The absolute floor. |
| 2-week | A bad storm, a job gap, a supply hiccup | The realistic target for most households. |
| 1-month | Extended disruption, illness, income loss | A strong, comfortable position. |
| 3-month | Serious regional disruption | The point where you stop relying on “the store reopening.” |
| 1-year | Long-term self-reliance | The classic deep store. A real commitment of space and money. |
If you do nothing else, get to two weeks. A two-week supply per person handles the vast majority of real-world situations people actually face, and it’s cheap enough that there’s no excuse.
Per-Person 2-Week Supply
This is the tier I’d push everyone to hit first. The table below is per adult, built to land around 28,000 calories (2,000 x 14) with a normal mix of staples and ready-to-eat foods. Quantities are rounded estimates, not lab-precise.
| Food | Amount per adult (2 weeks) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| White rice (dry) | 3 lbs | Cheap, dense, stores for years |
| Dried beans or lentils | 2 lbs | Protein + fiber |
| Pasta | 2 lbs | Fast to cook, kids eat it |
| Rolled oats | 1.5 lbs | Breakfast calories |
| Canned vegetables | 7 cans | Ready to eat, no cooking needed |
| Canned meat or fish (tuna, chicken) | 7 cans | Protein you don’t have to cook |
| Canned soup / stew / chili | 7 cans | Full meals, comfort food |
| Peanut butter | 1 jar (16 oz) | Calorie-dense, no cooking |
| Cooking oil | 16 oz | Fat + makes dry staples edible |
| Salt | 8 oz | Seasoning and preservation |
| Crackers / shelf-stable bread | 1 box | Easy carbs |
Scale it by people. Four adults? Multiply everything by four. Got kids? Count a young child as roughly half to two-thirds of an adult and adjust.
Per-Person 1-Month Supply
A month is roughly double the two-week list, but the mix shifts. At this tier you lean harder on the dry staples (rice, beans, oats, pasta) because they’re the cheapest calories per dollar and store the longest. Cans are convenient but expensive per calorie and heavier to store.
Target is about 60,000 calories per adult (2,000 x 30). Per-adult quantities, rounded:
| Food | Amount per adult (1 month) |
|---|---|
| White rice (dry) | 8 lbs |
| Dried beans / lentils | 5 lbs |
| Pasta | 4 lbs |
| Rolled oats | 4 lbs |
| Flour | 3 lbs |
| Canned vegetables | 15 cans |
| Canned meat / fish | 15 cans |
| Canned soup / stew | 12 cans |
| Peanut butter | 2 jars |
| Cooking oil | 32 oz |
| Sugar / honey | 1 lb |
| Salt | 1 lb |
| Powdered or shelf-stable milk | 1 small box |
| Coffee / tea (morale) | as desired |
That coffee line is not a joke. A month indoors during a crisis is a morale grind, and small comforts matter more than people admit. Store some.
The Classic One-Year Baseline
When you go past three months, most people stop trying to estimate item by item and use a known framework. The one I point people to is the classic one-year baseline, the long-term storage plan that the LDS (Latter-day Saints) tradition popularized decades ago. It’s a real, widely cited framework, not something I invented, and it’s been feeding-tested by a lot of families over a long time.
Per adult, per year, it looks roughly like this:
| Category | Amount per adult per year |
|---|---|
| Grains (wheat, rice, oats, pasta, flour) | ~300 lbs |
| Legumes (dried beans, lentils, split peas) | ~60 lbs |
| Fats and oils | ~20 lbs |
| Sugar / honey | ~60 lbs |
| Milk (powdered) | ~75 lbs |
| Salt | ~8 lbs |
That works out to roughly 2,000 to 2,300 calories a day if you actually ate through it, which lines up with the planning figure. It’s heavy on grains on purpose. Grains are the cheapest, densest, longest-storing calories you can buy.
Water: The Thing Everyone Under-Stores
Here’s the mistake I see constantly. People build a beautiful food store and have almost no water. You can go weeks without food. You can’t go more than about three days without water, and you’ll feel awful long before that.
The rule of thumb is 1 gallon per person per day (this is the FEMA figure). That covers drinking plus a little for cooking and basic hygiene. It is not generous. In heat, or for someone who’s sick, pregnant, or nursing, plan for more.
| People | Per day | 3 days | 2 weeks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 gal | 3 gal | 14 gal |
| 2 | 2 gal | 6 gal | 28 gal |
| 4 | 4 gal | 12 gal | 56 gal |
Look at that family-of-four, two-week number: 56 gallons. That’s more than a standard bathtub. People are genuinely shocked when they see it, which is exactly why water gets under-stored.
Adjusting for Kids, Calorie Needs, and Diets
The 2,000-calorie figure is an average. Adjust it to your actual household.
Kids. Count small children (under ~8) as roughly half an adult, older kids (8 to 13) as about two-thirds, and teenagers as a full adult or more. A 15-year-old boy can out-eat his parents.
Body size and activity. A large, active adult in a cold climate doing physical work might need 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day. If a crisis means you’re chopping wood and hauling water instead of sitting at a desk, your needs go up, not down. Plan high if you’re unsure. Extra food is a buffer, not a problem.
Dietary restrictions. This is where generic lists fall apart. If someone is gluten-free, a store built on wheat and pasta is useless to them. Build around what your household actually eats: rice and corn instead of wheat, more legumes and nuts for protein, and so on. Same for diabetes, allergies, and medical diets. Store food your people can actually eat on a normal day.
| Person | Suggested daily planning calories |
|---|---|
| Small child (under 8) | ~1,200 |
| Older child (8 to 13) | ~1,600 |
| Teen / adult woman | ~2,000 |
| Adult man | ~2,400 |
| Large or very active adult | ~2,800+ |
A Worked Example: Family of Four
Let me walk a real calculation end to end so you can copy the steps for your own household. Say the family is two adults, one 10-year-old, and one 5-year-old, and the goal is a one-month supply.
Step 1: Daily calories for the household.
- Adult woman: 2,000
- Adult man: 2,400
- 10-year-old: 1,600
- 5-year-old: 1,200
- Household total: 7,200 calories per day
Step 2: Multiply by days. One month (30 days): 7,200 x 30 = 216,000 calories.
Step 3: Fill the target with staples. Using the per-pound calorie numbers from earlier, you might cover it like this:
| Food | Amount | Approx calories |
|---|---|---|
| White rice | 40 lbs | ~66,000 |
| Dried beans / lentils | 25 lbs | ~39,000 |
| Pasta | 15 lbs | ~25,000 |
| Oats | 12 lbs | ~20,000 |
| Cooking oil | 1 gal (~7.5 lbs) | ~30,000 |
| Peanut butter | 4 jars (~4 lbs) | ~10,000 |
| Canned goods (veg, meat, soup) | ~60 cans | ~25,000 |
| Total | ~215,000 |
That hits the target. Notice how a single gallon of oil quietly delivers 30,000 calories, more than the rice does per pound. That’s the calorie-density principle doing the work.
Step 4: Don’t forget water. Four people for 30 days at 1 gallon each is 120 gallons. You almost certainly won’t store all of that, so this is where a filter plus a refillable source becomes part of the plan.
For the details of keeping all this food good for years (mylar bags, oxygen absorbers, food-grade buckets, rotation), see how to store food long-term.
How to Build It Up Affordably (Don’t Buy It All at Once)
The biggest reason people never build a food store is sticker shock. They price out a year of food, see a four-figure number, and quit. Don’t do that to yourself.
Build it on the margins of your normal grocery trips. The method that actually works:
- Buy two, use one. Each shop, grab an extra of the shelf-stable things you already eat. Two jars of peanut butter instead of one. The second one goes on the shelf. Your store grows without a big outlay.
- Hit the cheap staples in bulk. Rice, beans, oats, and pasta are the cheapest calories you can buy. A 20-pound bag of rice is a few dollars and a huge chunk of your calorie target. Prioritize these.
- Spend a fixed small amount each month. Even a modest amount each month of storage food adds up to a serious store inside a year, and you never feel the hit.
- Stack tier by tier. Finish your two-week supply before you think about a month. Finish a month before three. Each tier is a real milestone.
For a full shopping list of what to actually put on those shelves, here’s the deep pantry list I work from.
Don’t Overdo It: Store What You Eat
The classic beginner failure is buying a pile of food nobody likes, sealing it in a closet, and forgetting it. Five years later it’s expired, freezer-burned, or just inedible, and the money’s gone.
Two rules keep you out of that trap.
Store what you eat, and eat what you store. Your food store should be an extension of your normal pantry, not a separate museum of survival food. If you don’t eat lentils now, a hundred pounds of lentils is a bad plan. Buy what your family already cooks, and rotate through it so nothing dies of old age.
Rotate first-in, first-out. Put new cans behind old ones. Cook from the store regularly and replace what you use. This is the entire game with shelf-stable food, and it’s why “store what you eat” works. You’re not building a tomb, you’re building a deeper pantry that quietly cycles.
If you want to go beyond shelf-stable basics and extend storage life dramatically, that’s where preservation methods come in. I compared the main ones in freeze drying vs dehydrating vs canning, which is the natural next step once your basic store is in place.
Start with two weeks. Build from there. Store food you’ll actually eat, store more water than feels necessary, and rotate it. That’s the whole thing.