The Ugly Truth About
Food Storage & Prepping

If there is one simple truth you must understand it is this: "If they are trying to sell you something, they want your money and will tell you anything if it helps them get it." The food storage market is 100% unregulated and is full of misinformation, deception, and outright lies.

Normally any company selling you a product wants to compete directly with competitors. As a consumer this generally means you get a better product and value overall. However, this is not how the food storage market works. Food storage companies prey on the most basic of human emotions: Fear, Security, Survival. Because of this focus they have never had the consumers' best interests in mind. Food storage companies will sell you a truck load of packaged food, tell you it will last forever, and then wish you luck in the oncoming apocalypse with no care in the world for you as an individual—hoping you never understand what they actually delivered.

Compounding this problem is the rise of ecommerce. Anyone can now make a website and sell vapor. 90% of food storage comes from manufacturing plants that mix and package generic foodstuffs, slap a cute label for your food storage company of choice on the package, and sell you the same product you can get from any other seller. In fact, most food storage companies use the same recipes, packaging, and formulations as the just-add-water soup mixes you find in your mega mart.

The food storage market is driven 100% by social and economic factors. When recessions, tragedies, wars, elections, and natural disasters occur, food storage company sales skyrocket. This leads to oversaturation: people who have no place in this industry jump in, dump soup mix into a bag with a cute brand on it, and sell it as a premium product.

Greed drives this market—greed and greed alone. As a consumer you must educate yourself not only about the product you are purchasing but also about the companies you're purchasing from. "We vote with our dollar" holds more meaning here than in many other industries.

Most food storage companies use predatory practices and misinformation to drive their sales. They use aggressive marketing tactics and have no problem selling you old food stored in sweltering warehouses. The whole point of these companies is to make money so the owners and executives can get fat on your fears.

The most basic way to evaluate a food storage company is to evaluate its marketing practices. Do they sell products with fear and doom? Are there pictures of hurricanes, disasters, and sadness? Do they encourage violence directly or passively?

I have seen so many email campaigns blasting tens of thousands of people with images designed to create an emotional response and trigger fear and paranoia. These marketing practices boost sales and in turn profits. The most basic way to evaluate a food storage company is its marketing practices in good times as well as bad.

Lies, lies, lies—but often the hardest thing to crack. Most companies will compare themselves to others using extremely narrow content that highlights their strengths and hides their weaknesses. You'll often find a comparison chart so heavily skewed that it is more or less useless: serving sizes not being equal, or calories inflated with ingredients that add no nutritional value.

If you see a comparison chart, do not buy into it at all. This is the most basic way to manipulate someone into making a purchase. Look past the chart and educate yourself so you know the truth.

When it comes to online advertising, just about everything you see and read will be fake—and this especially applies to the food storage market.

Fake Sites: There are so many fake sites designed by companies and affiliates to build false trust. Look them up on the Better Business Bureau. Use a WHOIS tool to find out who they really are. These sites have one goal: get you to buy from a specific company rated as "the best."

Mom Blogs: There was a time these blogs were an honest source of information. Then, as they grew in popularity, they sold out entirely to companies—posting fake reviews written by the companies themselves.

Search Engines: SEO tactics are the lifeblood of the food storage industry, relying heavily on purchased services that create fake backlinks on blogs and forums that read as legitimate. Companies with the highest marketing spend rank highest for general search terms.

Spam: The food storage market will spam you to death with deals, promotions, and fear-mongering tactics. At the end of each quarter you can see these marketing efforts skyrocket as companies try to make their goals.

Amazon & Black Hat: One of the worst techniques is using black hat SEO methods to drive traffic to Amazon storefronts, because Google won't penalize Amazon.

Review Sites: If you find a review-only site, you can guess it was designed and created as a marketing tool by a food storage company. 99% of these sites are fakes.

The food storage industry is more cannibalistic than almost any other. Any company that innovates in the smallest way will have their idea stolen and reproduced by every competitor within months. Nearly every company now has a "just add water to the pouch and eat out of the baggie" offering—a method originally designed by Mountain House for their backpacking food line. Now it's just another gimmick.

There are almost no meaningful differences between serving, calories, content, or preparation technique between the various food storage companies' offerings. Some things worth considering that are actually meaningful: overall nutritional content, sprouting kits for nutrition-dense fresh food, and comfort foods—because if you have to rely on them, you're likely not in a great place emotionally.

If there is one portion of prepackaged food storage marketing that companies invest massively in above everything else, it is serving size. This is where the lies begin in earnest.

Each company calculates a serving size totally differently and there are no standards whatsoever. What we think of as a standard serving size when we sit down to eat is nothing comparable to the serving size these companies have defined. With some companies selling you 200 servings of an entrée at 1/3 cup each, you can easily see you're going to be hungry, malnourished, and unable to do any real work—or your "200 servings" is closer to 60.

It gets worse: many family kits are sold without you knowing they calculate the kit for 2 adults and 2 children, or 3 total servings per meal instead of 4. If you had to actually rely on your food storage to survive and base it on the numbers alone, you will come up short.

Simply put: find a company you've qualified, then buy a 30-day supply and use it exclusively for 30 days. See how it works out before you buy years of food storage.

There are two types of preparation to think through. First are personal economic hardships where you still have basic services available. Second—and far less likely—is preparing for a disaster where city services are not available.

In the second case, the most important thing is the most overlooked by more than 80% of all preppers: water. You can survive far longer without food than without water. Compounding this, nearly all premade and bulk food storage items require water to hydrate them. You can have all the cute little buckets of food stashed in your basement and you won't be able to eat a damn thing without water. In fact, it can actually be deadly to eat dried and freeze-dried foods without water because they pull moisture out of your body to be digested.

Two practical methods: 55-gallon drums and cisterns that collect water. The worst thing you can do is rely on bottled water—it leaches chemicals from plastic into the water, compounded over long storage periods.

It's a huge, inconvenient item to manage, which is why no one properly stores water. But having a clean source of drinking water is the most important thing you can do.

One of the nasty hidden truths about food storage sales online is that 99% are driven by commission-based sales—not through a greasy used car salesman, but something far more subversive.

All advertising drives a traceable reference from the ads you click on to the emails you receive, and these IDs and cookies leave a fingerprint that tracks everything from what you purchased to how much it cost. "Commission Junction" and "Pepper Jam" have armies of spammers and website affiliates mobilized by food storage companies bidding for their attention with commissions of up to 30% of each order.

What does this mean for you? You are paying for every dime these companies spend trying to one-up each other to get your purchase. 40–50% of each order you place was already spent on marketing, commissions, and internet goons who spend all day manipulating you into blindly buying something.

A GMO is a Genetically Modified Organism. Scientists cross genetics from animals with grains and legumes to produce hybrid organisms with desired characteristics. Many people do not want GMOs in their long-term food storage, and the food storage industry has greedily adopted "GMO Free" as a marketing buzzword.

As part of a campaign for a client in 2013, we tested the top 8 food storage companies' products for GMOs. As expected, all food items showed GMO quantitative contamination to varying degrees. Even the "GMO FREE" company tested positive at a higher level than most competitors.

Simply put, according to geneticists: there is no such thing as a truly GMO-free product anymore. Everything is so intermingled from field pollen to processing plant that it is 100% impossible for a product to be GMO-free. The term "Non-GMO" means nothing more than that they try not to source a known GMO ingredient. It's a shade of lies.

From a rational perspective: GMOs are now found throughout the entire food system from restaurants to your local market. People are not dying in waves of genetically induced genocide. A handful of GMOs is the least of your health concerns when relying on long-term storable food products.

One of the most important things you can understand as a buyer of food storage products is how the food storage market ebbs and flows. It is like clockwork and unbelievably predictable.

When there is a Democrat in office, food storage sales surge. In an election year, sales surge dramatically. When Republicans are in power, sales go dead flat across the board. When disasters happen—man-made, terrorist, or natural—there's a panic-driven sales spike.

Here's the trick you need to know: When the food storage market crashes, ALL food storage companies are overstocked with food they can't sell. This is the best time to buy—the food is freshest, has the longest shelf life, and you can often get it for a deal.

Conversely, the worst time to buy is during a disaster panic. The food has sat the longest, often in warehouses that are not climate controlled. I have personally seen food as old as 4–6 years sold online when these times happen.

There is only one simple truth here that you must understand: IT DOESN'T MATTER. There are pros and cons with each packaging method and every company tries to push their ideas about why they're so superior. The simple fact is that if you have to rely on your food storage, you're simply going to be happy you have food.

That said, there is one valid concern. Food manufacturers use the same packaging technique for many vendors, bagging the same product for them all with different labels. These generic white-label food storage companies have lower quality standards overall that lead to problems. If food is packaged below 5,000 ft in elevation (90% of manufacturers) and shipped at high altitudes, the packaging will swell due to air pressure differences, creating a risk of rupturing the pouches. Test your purchases for leaks so your food lasts years instead of months.

To be blunt: if you believe food is an insurance item, you are a fool. If you believe food will be the new international monetary system, you are also a fool. There are companies that aggressively market food storage items as an insurance product. There are MLMs preaching to blind followers that each packet of food is as good as cash.

There is a more balanced approach, however. Being prepared is essential. Statistically, most Americans only have 5–7 days of food in their homes, and most don't have a grid-free way of cooking it. Using natural disasters as a baseline, we can expect a worst-case government response in 12–14 days, law and order restored in 10–20 days, and utility outages lasting 20–30 days.

A healthy preparedness level is 30 days of food, water, medicine, toiletries, and comforts for your whole family—and 90 days at an aggressive level. In any event, if you must go longer than 30 days, lawlessness and relocation will likely drive you away from your stores long before they're used up.

There is a plague occurring right now in America, driven by supermarkets filled with overly processed food. We eat empty calories from old foods designed to sit on the shelf. The exact same mentality drives the food storage market: sell the cheapest food for the most money possible.

Processed foods are directly linked to a host of health conditions including colon cancer. With food storage, this is amplified significantly. Foods that once had some degree of wholesomeness have lost nearly all of it within 3–4 years of storage. A simple comparison: with seed storage, each year you store seeds a percentage will no longer germinate. If stored in ideal conditions you're lucky to get 4 years before 95% will no longer germinate. Simply put, dead things decay.

Food decay can be slowed by flushing with inert gases, adding oxygen absorbers, or treating with radiation—but regardless of the process, food decays and builds up free radicals and other cancer-causing compounds. You also lose the foods that can counter this effect: the high-antioxidant fresh foods of a normal diet.

This topic can directly affect the quality of food you buy and is the biggest direct contributor—next to storage temperature—to the lifespan and quality of your food storage.

There are two primary methods to remove oxygen from food: displaced gas and oxygen absorbers. Displaced gas uses an inert gas to displace oxygen in packaging. Nitrogen is most economical but will not kill bacteria and insect eggs where CO2 can. The best method is a mix of both.

There is a critical problem with displaced gas, however. On the assembly lines I've seen for several food storage companies, the process is simply a puff of gas into the top of the pouch right before sealing. The gas doesn't penetrate all the spaces between food and ingredients that were aerated when poured in—rendering it totally ineffective. The only truly effective method is placing a nozzle at the bottom of the packaging and flushing all the oxygen out. To date, I know of no manufacturer that does this.

Oxygen absorbers are tried and true. A simple packet dropped into food will, over a week or so, remove 99% of all oxygen—even drawing out O2 from the food itself. This is the most reliable method, though it's up to the manufacturer to properly handle the absorbers so they don't sit in atmosphere too long before use.

Personally, I pack my own food storage using a CO2 + nitrogen mix with an O2 absorber. I get the best of both worlds, total control over food quality—and it's cheaper than buying from any manufacturer.

Calories may keep you on your feet but vitamins and supplements will literally save your life. Food storage products are about as far from a healthy or nutritious food source as you can get.

We've all cooked fresh veggies by boiling them—then dumped a bright green pot of water down the drain without thought. The irony is that the water contained much of the nutrition of the food and the rest was destroyed by the cooking process. All processed ingredients used in quick-preparation food storage products are really lacking anything more than carbohydrates and calories, and this won't work long term—unless you like scurvy and goiters.

What should you do? At minimum: a good storage of high-quality multivitamins and a source of greens packed with micro and macro nutrients. Look into herbal preparations for simple medical needs; tinctures store for a long time. An herb garden is great in spring and summer but won't help in winter, so plan on growing and drying medicinal herbs as well.

The truth is that vitamins and supplements will never replace fresh nutrient-dense foods, but they will stave off many common ailments and help you when you're sick.

As covered in the colon cancer section, food storage products are less than healthy. The processed and aged nature of these foodstuffs increases the risks associated with colon cancer, nutritional deficiencies, and illness—especially when used over prolonged periods.

Fresh foods are difficult to address in food storage planning, but essential. There are really two primary ways to accomplish this:

1. A dedicated garden space: With a dedicated garden you have the ability to grow a wide variety of food items to fill the nutritional gap and produce excess that can be canned and saved for out-of-season times.

2. Sprouting Kits: These systems are small and easy to use, allowing you to keep a near-constant year-round supply of fresh veggie sprouts. Care must be exercised as you can develop salmonella if they are not cleaned and maintained with basic sanitary practices.

In either case, plan on augmenting your food storage with fresh foods—or your long-term storage plans can be impacted by illness caused by the very foods meant to prolong your existence.

This may be one of the most gross marketing gimmicks out there and it has only one motive: greed and continual sales. Food storage companies push the concept of food storage rotation to a degree of perversion.

Rotating your food storage is a good idea—you use things up and replace them before they get too old, so when you need to rely on your storage you get the longest value out of the foodstuffs. But the concept of food storage rotation also preaches that you only store what you eat on a daily basis anyway. I have a feeling that your daily diet doesn't come in cute little quick-serve Mylar bags designed to survive the apocalypse.

One of the simple truths is that IF the really bad day comes where the world falls apart and we start living in a post-apocalyptic movie, most prepping methods simply won't work. Governments do collapse, there are riots and civil wars even today with our internet and La-Z-Boys. If you make yourself a target, you will eventually be overrun.

The best possible solution is to be prepared long in advance with many hidden caches of food versus one large hoard that can be taken from you. If you live in a dense urban area this can be borderline impossible, but if you live in the suburbs or rural areas you can easily bury 5-gallon buckets with lids.

While I don't personally believe in Yellowstone blowing up or an asteroid impact, I can see how war, martial law, and civil unrest could make us live like there's a gestapo marching down each street. This is the more likely outcome for a first-world country—and if we've created this artificial market of food storage preying on fear, we better use a little common sense.

As a consumer you must be extremely aware that there is no regulation for the food storage industry's claims. If you're buying food to last 20 years, understand that no one is verifying that this is even possible. More importantly, there is no verified source of information about the nutritional content of your food as it ages.

Most companies will happily slap a label on their product to bait you into trusting it. Take "Kosher" as an example. For a product to legitimately be called Kosher, an actual rabbi must be present at time of manufacturing. Of all food storage manufactured for mass distribution, 82% is manufactured in Utah. Just how many Jewish rabbis are spending all day at food storage manufacturing plants in Utah? Companies buy one or two certified kosher ingredients, mix them into their pre-packed recipes, and slap on a Kosher label. But it's not kosher.

You do have some leverage, however. The FDA requires companies to provide both Kosher and Non-GMO certificates from their manufacturers for every ingredient. If they can't provide them, don't purchase from them.

I have personally seen several companies not only write their own reviews but edit and censor reviews from customers. One client I worked with would take every one- and two-star review and edit it to a five-star review. It's now common for companies to use Freelancer.com and Fiverr to source fake reviews on their site and on review sites like Google. 90% of the reviews and testimonials are completely fake.

Why do they focus so heavily on reviews? Simply put, 3 out of every 4 purchases online are influenced by consumer reviews. Places like Amazon and eBay have created a degree of trust that consumers have come to rely on, and these companies exploit that trust.

Simply put: within this industry, you must be extremely cautious before believing any review you find on a food storage company's website.