Taking Stock Part IV: Maintain
This is a new series on MoolaSavingMom.com all about stockpiles! For strategic couponers, a stockpile is the evidence of our hard work.
View Part I here
View Part II here
View Part III here
In the last sessions we’ve talked about how to determine your needs and how to organize the stockpiles. In this session we talk about how to keep it organized & up to date.
I cleaned out my stockpile in order to put up new shelves- I found 5 boxes of cereal that expire in less than 30 days. I took 4 of the 5 to the Food Bank and the 5th box is being eaten by my family now. Here are some tips for keeping your stockpile organized & not letting foods expire. It doesn’t need to take a ton of time or work- but it requires commitment.
- Use a permanent marker to mark Month/Year larger on the tops of each box and store them with that date facing out. This will allow you to see at a glance if anything is going to expire soon.
- Keep a box or bag in the pantry to put close dated items & donate to a local food pantry. I try to donate once a month.
- Rotate. Think like a grocery store. Put the new products BEHIND the older ones. Otherwise you are pushing back the old product and it will expire before it’s ever seen!
- Don’t overstock. If your family only uses 1 box of cereal a month having 40 boxes will last over 3 years! No cereal is good that long. Be sure to only buy as much as your family can use. If it’s free(or a money maker) then donate it…before putting that box on a shelf pull out an older one (not expired though) and put that in the donation box.
- Once a month I spend about an hour going through all my food products and analyzing what I have and make sure to pull out anything that needs to be used ASAP and put that in a special spot. Those get used ASAP or donated.
- I have an overflow area and a “everyday” area. I keep all my “super stock” (ahem my 20 bottles of A1) in the overflow area. This allows me to see what what use daily (cereals, some canned veggies, crackers, etc) that is open and everything in the over flow area is “off limits” to the kids. This avoids having 7 open boxes of crackers!
- Stay organized. It only takes a week of being lax with putting things where they belong to find a pile of grocery bags on the floor and a big mess!
- Use what you have- if you have 3 jars of pasta sauce about to expire use 1 or 2 and donate the third.
- Think outside the box- if you have pasta sauce you don’t need to make pasta! You can use it for many other recipes that may not even use pasta!
- Be careful with temperature, light and moisture! All three can degrade food much faster!
If you are finding items are expiring before you can use them here are some tips to stop that:
- Donate More.
- Re-evaluate your buying habits. Our eating habits change. While my kids used to LOVE granola bars- they decided last month they’d had enough. So I stopped buying them.
- Eat what you have. If we have Cheerios- we eat Cheerios. If we have Raisin Bran- we eat Raisin bran.
- Put the tempting items out of site. If my kids see I have Lucky Charms they will want them. If they don’t see them- they are just as happy with the box of Trix that is already opened. Put the items that are tempting to your kids (or Husband or yourself) until the other items are used. Then it’s exciting to see that tempting item come out!
What tips do you have for keeping your stockpile from going stale?
One thing I use my extra pasta sauce for is meatball subs. We get meatballs and pasta sauce cheap all the time. All I have to do is pick up a pack or two of subrolls and my family can all eat subs for less than the price of one footlong meatball sub at subway. I also used some of my extras for christmas gifts. I was worried it would be tacky but my mom and sister in law loved it since they don’t coupon. In November I got a box out for each of them and then whenever I saw stuff on sale they might want I would through it in their box. By Christmas I had a good amount of things like detergent, soap, pancake mix, syrup, toothpaste, fruit cups, mccormick extracts, etc. I made a gift basket for my boss with some items out of my stock pile like lotions, lip gloss, nuts, and cookies
My question is this – How do you keep bugs out of the pantry? I had a stockpile of about 10 boxes of mac and cheese. One day I pulled some out to make dinner and found tiny, tiny, little holes in the box. When I opened it, there were bugs inside that were little, but way too big to have gotten through the holes. I checked and there were holes through ALL the boxes. How do I prevent this? It seems to happen most, but not exclusively on boxes containing pasta.
It sounds like some larve of some sort got in and grew- maybe some type of trape around the bottom?
Ug – I hear ya! It happens to my pasta, too – regardless of the brand and also sometimes to rice. I even put each box or bag in a ziploc after it has been opened and still sometimes little tiny bugs. SO gross. I decided to change the cabinet where I kept those items (maybe it was too dark in there or the door was not opened often enough) – so they’re now behind a different door. The items I couldn’t fit in there I keep in the original cabinet and use Rubbermaid/Tupperware containers. Don’t mess with me, bugs!