LDS church has online ordering for food storage, and you don’t have to be a member (as far as I can tell). It’s already packed for 20-30 year storage for most items, and the prices are reasonable. I haven’t checked shipping because I buy from them locally. The quality is good too - the potatoes, oatmeal, flour, macaroni, and sugar taste as good as major brands, even years later. I’m a little annoyed with the rice because it takes a little more water than the label directions claim and still doesn’t taste quite as good as typical rice. Their milk powder (20 years?) is good too but not available online yet. Their apple slices are fruit, and last forever, but not something I would eat often except for the nutrition. According to rumor, they will have onions and carrots with 20 year or 30 year shelf lives fairly soon (whatever that means).
I wouldn’t store just the LDS food, but it is a cheap and comparatively compact way to store massive amounts of calories for several decades. For variety, I have oats, wheat, potatoes, and rice in roughly equal amounts. Once you have that, it’s easy to supplement the beans, sugar, and starch with MREs, spices, cans, and hunting/gathering for other needs.
I don’t have an LDS store close, so I just order on line. It’s been about 6 or 8 months since our last order. You do not have to be a member to order, and there was no shipping charge.
I haven’t ordered since they started selling the apples on line, but I do plan to get some of those too. I don’t store just LDS items either, but I don’t have any MRE’s.
I have plenty of stuff that you can just eat out of a can if you have to, and quick soups, fiber bars and other stuff that we use on a regular basis for situations when we are pressed for time or too tired to cook.
I bought a bunch of powdered milk with 20 year shelf life from several internet sources when they were on sale at 3 bucks a gallon or less. Fresh milk is now above 4 bucks at our local Walmart.
I ordered my rice from Walmart.com. It was on sale at a decent price, and I repacked it in Mylar bags with O2 absorbers, and put them in food grade plastic buckets.
Like I said, I like the kits for long term. It’s all food that we would normally eat anyway along with the other stuff we buy or grow.
I buy chickens and pork on sale and pressure can it. Keep about a year’s supply on hand. We have beef in the freezer. If we would ever have an extended power outage, we could use our generators to run the frig, freezer, window air conditioner, tv etc.
We could also use one of our alternate cooking sources and pressure can the contents if we needed to. Most of this was not started as a prepper thing, it was just our way of life, and frugal living. Buy stuff on sale, grow your own, and preserve it to get through our winter.
We camped out a lot when we were younger, so we just have a lot of useful stuff. When the market crashed and oil prices spiked we knew that higher food inflation would be along shortly, so we just increased the amounts in order to stock up on everything we could at the cheaper prices.
Then of course, it became a interesting question. What if we had to live like pioneers, and/or be totally self sufficient? How could we do it? Of course with our well and septic system we country people get a head start from city folk in a way.LOL
Anyhow I think the LDS website rocks, and am glad they are expanding it.