My Canned Food Rotation System

Canned food is a great thing to have on hand for everyday situations as well as emergency ones.  After learning that canned goods last about 3-6 years beyond the date stamp on the can, you're probably realizing--like I have--that keeping as many extras on hand as possible is a pretty wise thing to do.

From impassable snow-packed roads to pre-hurricane panic buying and even a worldwide pandemic, you just never know when having some ready-to-prepare meals stored might come in pretty handy.

It's important, though, to keep track of what you have and by when it should be used.  I started doing this years ago by first buying a separate storage cabinet and then filling it with canned goods.  I had dry soup mixes and cans of tomatoes, beans, corn, peaches, pears, soup, tuna, chicken, etc.  (This certainly doesn't have to be stored in a special cabinet like mine, especially if you have a large pantry.  However, this is what works for me.  I've heard of boxfuls under beds, so do whatever works for you.)

MY CANNED FOOD ROTATION SYSTEM
If you search "food storage system" on Pinterest, there are a lot of cool things you can build (or buy) that will automatically rotate your canned goods.  There isn't one "right way," so just be sure you find something that works for you.  My method is just the one that works for me without a lot of effort.

First of all, I rotate all my canned food every two years.  So everything I buy in 2020 will be used in 2022.  Everything I'm using in 2020 was purchased in 2018.  To keep track of all this, I put stickers on the cans.  Like this.

Each sticker is for a different year.  You can see 3 here--one I'll be using this year (2020), one I'll be using next year (2021), and one I'll be using in 2022.  I've used star and heart stickers before, too.  :)  And I even have a master sheet letting me know which stickers I used for which year so I don't forget.  My brain has a lot of things in it, so sometimes the small ones fall out.

I keep the different years on different shelves.  I use that year's cans throughout the year, restocking my regular pantry with them until they're gone.  (Then I have room on the shelf to buy this year's food.)  Buying a few extra cans each shopping trip just about does it.

I definitely recommend some longer-term canned goods, too, that you don't have to rotate as often.  Dry canned goods in bigger #10 cans like oatmeal and rice and dried apples can stay in a dark, cool place for 20 years or more!  I just write the purchase dates on the labels on these.  I only use the sticker method for the ones I'm rotating every few years.  I really like having a few things I can buy and just forget about for a decade or two.

ONE BIG THING I LEARNED
I learned a few things about my canned food storage during COVID-19 isolation.  The pandemic (and questioning whether I really wanted to go out to go to the store or not) made me consider my stored food for actual daily use instead of just in theory.  I discovered that my method could use a little bit of improvement.  It was pretty good, and I'd been doing this for 15 or 20 years, but one thing I could do a little better would be to have a solid plan.

I'd heard the advice "store what you eat," which is great advice, and that's what I'd been doing.  But I realized I didn't have an end goal.  So we have extra peanut butter and jam, but do I have a plan to be able to make bread?  I have tomatoes and pasta sauce, but is it in the right ratio to the noodles?  What would I do with a can of evaporated milk?  I've heard it's a good substitution for milk, but have I tried it in a recipe?

So I have made some notes about how to improve what I store.  I started experimenting with recipe substitutions, as you know from reading this blog.  :)  But I also realized what I could use more of or didn't need as much of.

I have decided that to make my canned food storage more efficient, I would make a meal plan with enough meals for 3 weeks--all made just from my canned food storage.  I can do that from a lot of the recipes I have here, in fact.  (And canned soup does the trick, too.  So does a bowl of oatmeal.)  And that's how my 21-Day Meal Plan was born.  You can head over to that link for a (free) printable, too.

Having an actual plan means that when I buy those extra canned goods for my storage cabinet, I will be making sure I'm not left with a cake mix and a can of pinto beans at the end of the day.

Have you found a good method for rotating your canned goods?  Do you have a good plan for using them?  I'd love to hear about them--let me know in the comments below.  

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