Simplify Your Family's Emergency Preparedness

How to Track your Long Term Food Storage

How to Track your Long-Term Food Storage

**This post contains affiliate links, which means if you click on a link and make a purchase, I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you.

A couple weeks ago, I shared some of my best tips for organizing and storing your long term food storage. I hope that gave you to nudge to just.get.started.

But, now I’m sure you’re wondering “Okay, Mel, that’s great. Now I have this food, but how do I keep track of it all? And how do I know when it expires so I didn’t just waste money?”

Fear not! Today I’m sharing some of my best tips for how to track your long-term food storage.

Plus, how to get access to the spreadsheet I personally use to make sure I don’t miss expiration dates, how I know exactly what I have in my long-term food storage supply, and where to find it in my house.

My personal method to track long-term food storage

When it comes to keeping track of my long-term food storage, there are 2 parts.

1 - Inventory

It’s really important to be able to look at something and know what food you have (and when it expires), so you know where you should focus your money/efforts next.

2 - Organization

It’s also really important to know where the food is. This may sound silly. But unless you have a storage room where you can put all of your food storage in one place, it can get messy real quick!

Part 1 - INVENTORY: The Spreadsheet

You won’t be shocked … but yes, I have a spreadsheet. It’s not very fancy, but it makes me so happy.

Let me take you through the screenshot shown above.

COLUMNS 1 & 2 are to keep track of how many cans you have, and which type. Since most of my cans of long-term food storage comes from Thrive Life, and they have 2 different sizes of cans, I have a column for each. The more typical size is a #10 can, but then the second column is for pantry cans. To learn the difference between a pantry can and a #10 can from Thrive Life, see this post.
COLUMN 3 is self explanatory – I chose to alphabetize the name of the food, to make it easier to find what I’m looking for.
COLUMN 4 is just the expiration year, so I can look quickly to see if anything is expiring soon. I have made a rule for the cell to turn red if it expires in the 2020’s, yellow if it expires in the 2030’s, and green if it doesn’t expire until the 2040’s or after.
COLUMN 5 is for the full expiration date.
COLUMN 6 is where I put the general location of that food item. If I want to find a specific food item (whether it’s time to rotate that item, or if I find myself in a pinch and need to open a can because I ran out of something and don’t have time to go to the grocery store), I go to the map (see below).

Part 2 - ORGANIZATION: The map

This may seem a little ridiculous to you, and if it’s overkill, that’s totally fine – you do you. I just found myself wasting a lot of time pulling boxes out from underneath my bed, to find what I was looking for.

By creating a simple diagram of the area under the beds in our home, I am able to find things much quicker.

Aaaand…that’s it!
There’s really nothing too fancy about it.
The important thing is, that you have a system that works for you. Just make sure you know WHAT you have, and WHERE to find it!