Having a healthy food stockpile list is essential to any household – but what’s a real foodie to do? What are the best fruits and vegetables to stockpile when you don’t want preservatives or processed foods? Here is the best food to store up from the produce section:
The best food to stockpile is what your family already eats!
The best food to stockpile is primarily getting ahead on what your family regularly consumes. In addition to fruits and vegetables, this works really well for everything else on a food stockpile list like storing grains and how to store meat, protein, and oils long-term.
At first look, it can appear challenging for fresh fruits and vegetables. However, there are easy solutions to ensure that you and your family have what you need in case of an emergency.
I want to eat real food, frugally, not because I’m trying to be prepared. Hopefully, this food stockpile list will inspire you to get overstocked on some of these items instead of just stocked.
A baby step. I like those. 
How to Store Fruits for Long Term Preparedness
Keeping fruit in your freezer will only last a day or two if your power goes out.
RELATED: How to freeze strawberries
Assuming you’ve eaten all the frozen fruit in your freezer in the first few days of a problem, here’s a food stockpile list you can rely on:
Canned fruit
Any sort of canned fruit, simply because it’s cooked, has fewer nutrients than fresh, frozen, dehydrated, or freeze-dried fruit.
I recommend looking for fruit in glass jars. You can look for preserves and jellies. If you make your own preserved, you’ll avoid extra sugar and nasty ingredients.
Even though it lasts for a long time, I don’t recommend it unless you make it yourself. Applesauce is an easy option (you can even make applesauce in the Instant Pot!)
Dehydrating fruit
Keep dehydrated fruit around as a means of preserving the summer produce, particularly strawberries and apples. They’re easy to make into fruit rolls. Bananas also dehydrate well along with tropical fruits like pineapple.
The issue with dried fruit, either home-dried or purchased, is that it doesn’t last forever. You can only keep on hand what you’ll actually continue to go through naturally in a year’s time or so. The trick is keeping more on hand than you need – we can eat a lot of raisins, dates, and dried pineapple, but it’s all too easy to run out.
Freeze-dried fruits
Stock up on some freeze-dried fruits. Advantages include:
- lightweight and compact for storage, travel
- lasts years without opening it!
- seriously tasty, especially as finger foods for toddlers
The only downfall is that it feels expensive.
If you regularly make smoothies, buy ahead on freeze-dried fruit powders. You can find exotic ones like dragon fruit, camu camu, and kaibae baobab on Thrive Market or at your favorite health food store.
RELATED: Advantages and Disadvantages of Freezing, Dehydrating, Canning and More
Fruit you can store whole
We keep whole apples in our garage to use over the winter to the tune of about 400lbs a year. However, this only lasts 3-4 months.
Pears can last a couple of months under the right conditions – dark and cool.
Fruit Juice
We don’t keep a lot of fruit juice on hand because of the extra sugar and lack of fiber. However, there might be value in keeping juice on hand in case of an emergency.
The only way I use it is for homemade gelatin squares which you could make if you had access to fire or heat to use up that juice.
Grow your own fruit
Look up what grows naturally in your area and see what you can plant (or transplant from a neighbor or friend!)
Around me in Michigan these are common:
- berries:
- raspberries
- strawberries
- blueberries
- elderberries
- mulberries
- currants and gooseberries
- fruit trees:
- apples
- apricots
The downside is that they will only be fresh during the harvest but you can preserve them with the above methods to add to your food stockpile list.
How to Store Vegetables for Long-Term Preparedness
Vegetables are the best food to stockpile because they’re the healthiest and every diet recommends eating vegetables!
If the beauty of dried and canned fruit is that you don’t have to cook it to eat it, the downfall of dried vegetables is that you really do need to rehydrate and cook them. That takes both water and a heat source.
Dehydrated vegetables
If you have a limited amount of storage space, dehydrated foods are a great choice because they get so darn small when you take all the water out and don’t require any kind of refrigeration!
We dehydrate vegetables, mostly tomatoes, and peppers, not because we like them, but purely to make use of inexpensive summer produce after I run out of room in the freezer for peppers and the energy for canning tomatoes.
Your family may enjoy making vegetable chips out of various root vegetables.
You CAN dehydrate just about anything, but what will you actually use as you go in your day-to-day cooking?
We regularly dehydrate greens and add them to sauces and smoothies. I shred and dehydrate zucchini to sneak into tomato sauces.
It’s easy to dehydrate onions, garlic, herbs, and celery for your healthy food stockpile.
Canned vegetables
You can can your own vegetables with a pressure canner. Here’s a beginner’s guide on how to can tomatoes.
The downsides of store-bought canned vegetables are nutrient loss, sodium and other unnecessary additives, and the high heat required to cook them.
RELATED: Are canned veggies healthy?
I’m also wary of the plastic lining of metal cans because BPA has just been replaced with BPS which appears to be just as harmful. Opt for glass when you can. Pun intended.
If you want the security of canned vegetables but don’t eat them regularly, buy some (on sale) and mark in your calendar when to donate them to a food pantry so that they’re before their expiration date, then restock.
Vegetables you can buy in glass jars
You can buy or make your own kimchi, sauerkraut, and pickles. Here’s how to ferment any veggie in small batches.
Buy jars of these vegetables. (My favorite source for organic is Thrive Market.)
- tomato and tomato sauce
- olives
- salsa
- capers (hard to remember to use but they’re great for female reproductive health)
Vegetables you can store whole
Your best bet for vegetables stored whole in a cool environment such as your garage, cellar, or fridge are your:
- root vegetables
- squash
- cabbage and Brussels sprouts
- cauliflower
- onion
- potatoes
Read more on the longest-lasting vegetables with how to ideally use and store each.
RELATED: Rutabaga Recipes & Roasted Vegetable Salad Recipe
Best Foods to Stockpile
The bottom line in my opinion is that fruits and vegetables are much easier to store and use than meats and proteins, but both are an important part of a healthy diet.
Remember to eat what you store, and store what you use.
What fruits and vegetables (and in what forms) does your family eat anyway? That’s what you want to stock up on. As always, be sure to read the labels and make sure that the only ingredient is the food itself!
You can also use a grill or BBQ pit as a ‘heat source’ for cooking foods when the power is out. I lost power for 18 days following Hurricane Ike and I have an electric stove so it was not usuable. I have some heavy duty pots that along with bottled water allowed me to ‘cook’ on the grill.
I stock canned and dried food every spring to be prepared for hurricane season. Other than during Hurrican Ike in 2008, I rarely eat it. What I ususally do is at the end of hurricane season is donate whatever is left that I won’t eat to a local food pantry. That way nothing is wasted. It probably costs me more money since i have to ‘restock’ every spring, but I hate wasting food and jsut through out about 20 cans of tuna that expired in 2011 that I found hiding in the back of a closet.
The thought of ever running out of home canned tomatoes seems a bit foreign to me. I’m almost 25 (born in 1986) and a year or so ago, I made tomato soup with two quarts: one was two years younger than me and the other was from the summer right before I started elementary school (1991)! Mighty tasty, too. And we do use a fair number of those cans each winter, though they’re usually rotated a bit better than that.
But then again, my grandmother never felt good about her pantry unless she had put up at least 300 quarts of green beans over the summer. So maybe we’re a bit strange when it comes to canning…
I just wanted to add that I have been canning/drying/freezing fruits and vegetables for 40+ years. My dehydrated veggies have lasted 3-5 years in glass jars with dried winter squash lasting 6 years-storing in a ziploc bag inside a plastic bucket. We have always stored all our food storage in a cool, dry, dark room in the basement. While some nutrients are lost when processing, at least I know we have food on our shelves and the fruit/juice will provide our family with meals we are accustomed to. Rotation is the key to food storage whether it is bottled at home, bought at the store or dryed/freeze dried. Thank you, Shenna, for all the information! Our food storage is used in every meal, every day. And, thanks, Katie for all the good information. Also, I just wanted to say that I dehydrated portebello mushrooms last summer (we got a whole box for $5, fresh) and they are wonderful added to soups and stews in the slow cooker. I’m glad someone said to dry greens, think I will do some soon. Oh, and my mom eats the tomatoes I dehydrate like candy! 🙂 I also make my own hash browns and cubed potatoes to freeze and freeze extra garden veggies for use all winter. 🙂 And I really like the cream of chicken soup recipe from Tammy’s recipes. It freezes well and I know what we are eating. 🙂
Hey, I’ve dried mushrooms, too, and added them to soups. I usually do it when I find big bags of reduced mushrooms at my local produce stand.
Your comment about tomatoes reminded me that last year when I had way too many cherry tomatoes to share or use up, I dried them in my dehydrator and added them to pasta salads. Cutting the cherry tomatoes in half helped them dry faster.
Don’t overlook SPROUTS! I have a stock of mung beans just for sprouting, which is basically growing your own veggies. You can also sprout almost any bean (not kidney beans though) and wheat berries, too. I think having seeds and beans are an important part of preparedness.
I don’t have a pressure canner either. I buy marinara made with natural ingredients (no HFCS, soybean oil, etc.) in lieu of canned tomatoes which I stopped purchasing last year. However, I do think that in an emergency, some food principles can be relaxed if necessary- it’s better to eat veggies from a can than to NOT eat veggies at all during an emergency!
And don’t forget that in a true emergency, you’ll need more nutrition and more calories generally. If there is a natural disaster, chances are there might not be electricity (you’ll have to heat and cool yourself, which burns calories) and lots more manual work. Factor that in and overplan!
I do believe that Azure Standard sells organic dried fruit.
I don’t know anything about the freeze drying process from years ago – or currently. But I know when I was a kid my parents were told their food storage would last 30 years. It didn’t. If the process has changed recently – how do people really KNOW that the products will ALL last for 20-25 years – or whatever they’re saying. I don’t believe that any of these companies are trying to be fraudulent. They truly believe for some reason – hopefully scientific based testing – that this food will last for a LONG time. BUT – my own experience has been that it didn’t happen for us. If I was truly hungry and needing to rely on that food to eat and then went to my food storage and opened up can after can of a useless mess – that would be so upsetting….especially if I had hungry children still at home to feed. As it was – when we discovered the results – it was disappointing and too bad….but we weren’t going to be going without anything. It was just going to be a little practice….
Is there such a thing as freeze-dried ORGANIC food storage? I mean, if it has to be kept in rotation in order to keep it fresh and all, that means that we need to eat it regularly AND in a case of emergency. I think I would rather not prepare for an emergency if it means adding nutrient-poor canned and freeze-dried items like white flour and pesticide-laden freeze-dried strawberries. Especially because in my house we deal with allergies. I think it would almost be better that we do a 3-4 day FAST than eat that stuff! But, if there was a truly clean food-storage system, I would be interested in the investment.
I think what needs to be considered is this: when is ‘UP to 30 years’? hmmmmmm And I definitely am a fan of BYU – attended there myself. But I know what I personally experienced. All of the products my family had were still sealed in the cans from the company. They had always been in a cool, dark place. And SOME of it was awful. I truly believe that the best way to store food is: store what you eat, eat what you store. Rotate!!
Yep! I don’t think I’d keep dehydrated food that long… I would be too nervous that it would fail when I needed it.
I recently gave a class on dehydrating foods to my church ladies group. In doing my research I read that Brigham Young University did research/tests and found that dehydrated foods can last up to 30 years if kept in cool dark places and they recommended not storing them in zip top bags but jars or tupperware etc. Sorry I don’t remember the link.
Katie – wish I could tell you when ‘yum’ ceased and became ‘tar’. But we didn’t open cans periodically to test them out. They were just in a well insulated storage area for emergency. But at the 18-22 year mark – definitely lots of YUCK!!
I’m going to share a word of caution about investing in large amounts of freeze dried foods. I’m ‘mature’ enough to have been on the far end of the 20-25 year shelf life for freeze dried foods….several different types of food and several different brands. I remember as a young kid my parent’s enthusiasm about easily storing all this wonderful food. They had tasting parties, etc and it DID taste and look wonderful. BUT – years later, when my siblings had all moved away and my parents didn’t want or need to store all that any longer – they gave it to me. I opened some of the cans to see if they were worth the space to store. Things like baking powder were a little ‘flat’ but still useful. Freeze dried bananas were fine. Any other fruit – had turned black and looked like tar! I tried rinsing it, boiling it, all kinds of methods to reconstitute or revive it. NO WAY! It wasn’t even useful for the compost. The peas, corn, carrots – were all the same. Those hadn’t turned to ‘black tar’ – but they would NOT reconstitute. They stayed hard as rocks after soaking, simmering, boiling, leaving overnight to soak, etc. I totally LOVE some freeze dried fruits – like strawberries – to use NOW….but I caution anyone that chooses to rely on this method for preparing ahead for the long term. You need to Rotate food to keep the food value ‘up’. And the only things that really last for 20-25 years – or forever…..are things like wheat, honey, etc. Freeze drying does NOT work to keep food edible or nutritious for Forever.
Thank you! I wonder how long between “yum” and “tar”? Your first person experience is invaluable… I’m editing the post now! 🙂 Katie
I wonder if there is a difference between how things were freeze dried 20 years ago compared to now and if that makes a difference in how long foods will actually last.
I love freeze-dried foods…saves us a lot of waste that we usually have with fresh…however, the length of time that the unopened cans will last or retain the optimal nutritional value depends on the”ideal” storage temp…68-70 degrees is the highest you can go and fit into the ‘ideal’ conditions…for about every 6 degrees lower you can get the temp, you extend the life of the product. And there is a difference between really good and life sustaining…I think Emergency Essentials has a page with this info on it… 🙂 Really enjoying these posts!
I like to dehydrate greens after I’ve run out of space for them in the freezer; they’re actually lower on my list for the freezer. Then I crush the greens and add them to sauces, ricotta cheese, and anything else I can sneak them into.
I’d like to do more with the fruit drying. I’ve tried fruit leather and wasn’t successful. Maybe I need to try again. 🙂
What a good idea with the greens! And how funny, b/c fruit leather is the one thing I did first and have never had trouble with. We love it! Thank you for the idea! 🙂 Katie
Just a comment about the freeze dried fruits, you have to consider they stay good for 25 years and with inflation likely when you open them you will save money anyways!
Is my understanding correct, that BPA is only in the white-lined cans, not the plain metal (inside) ones? Unfortunately, it seems like most organics are in the white cans (why IS that?) But, for plain old canned beans and canned tomatoes and such, I’ve found that often the generics are not white-lined, so while not ideal foods necessarily, if you’re buying canned anyway, that at least avoids the BPA right?
I think you are correct – but tomatoes are always in white-lined cans because of the acidity, as are fruits, and I think beans too. ? Regular veggies probably aren’t – good point!
Thanks, Katie
We had a food storage class a few years ago where we did a comparison of freeze-dried and dehydrated vegetables–particularly broccoli and spinach. Surprisingly, the dehydrated vegetables won across the board, according to taste, cost and storage space.
Dehydrated vegetables need to be blanched just like frozen ones. So now all I do is buy frozen broccoli and spinach (the best I can find) and just pour it right out of the freezer bag (still frozen) and onto the drying sheet and then dehydrate until done! It works great, it’s much cheaper than freeze-dried and it also takes less space to store. Freeze-dried foods actually consume the same amount of space as the original food, so keep that in mind when you’re buying it–it won’t get any “bigger” when it’s cooked.
You can powder your dried tomatoes in a blender/food processor:) Powdering is also good for spinach.
Angelia,
I did try that, but maybe my blender was too weak. The particles were just too big and would float, not come together into a “sauce” or “paste” when I tried to rehydrate. ??? Maybe I over-dry them, or they’re too thick?
Thanks anyway! 🙂 Katie
I find using a stick blender helps to reconstitute after adding the water & letting it soak a bit.
Here in the humid south, sun drying is out because the food would mold long before it dried. But I have my dehydrator running nearly 24/7 right now and just got my Mom one for Mother’s Day!
Love this series, Katie!
You mentioned raisins and it reminded me that I was surprised to learn from a dentist that raisins are actually quite terrible for the teeth! He said that they are worse than candy for creating cavities. I’m thinking that dates and other (super-sugary) dried fruits probably fall into the same category. Of course, for the current series you’re doing, (coming up with food to keep bodies going when there’s nothing else to eat), worrying about these niggly things doesn’t take top billing.
That’s great info about the nutritional values of Freeze Dried food. That’s something I’ve always wondered about.
The problem with raisins is that they don’t dissolve – like candy. And since children often eat them as a snack, they aren’t as likely to brush their teeth right after and the raisins bits stay on their teeth for a long time. Raisins are good for you but children need to learn to brush properly and parents need to remember that after eating raisins (and other sticky foods that won’t dissolve) – they really need to brush their teeth.
Shenna,
Thank you for this! I’ve always been sad when I hear about raisins and teeth – best at breakfast in oatmeal, maybe, w/ teeth brushing right afterward. 😉 Katie
I recently invested in some dwarf (2-3 feet) citrus trees – the kind that you grow in a pot. I move them outdoors when it’s warm, bring them in the fall, and get fruit year-round. I LOVE having fresh lemons on hand, and my kids love the tiny oranges. I purchased mine from Michgan Bulb, but I’m sure they’re available elsewhere. A great vitamin C source in an emergency.
I love this series! We were talking to my husbands 96 year old grandfather the other day and he was telling us about how he used to dehydrate fruit in the sun.
I really need to use my dehydrator more. I also want to look into a root cellar. Since our basement is heated, we would need to wall off a section and vent to the outside. There are lots of other methods that could work too, I just haven’t gotten around to implementing any of them. For now, in the winter, we just put our root vegetables in the garage.
Great idea using your garage! I’d love to have an option like that. For now, I cram our freezer full of sasonal produce, and I’ve found that strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers seem to be the most helpful and most used items.