I heard that Mountain House is no longer selling to retail customers...
They are selling to the government, now.
Here's what's posted on the Mountain House site:
Dear Valued Customers:
In response to the recent concern of FEMA purchasing Mountain House products:
FEMA posted the following RFI (Request for Information) on 1-20-2011. In the RFI, FEMA was asking for information for 14M/day for 10 days. They then withdrew the RFI on 1-27-11. The RFI is a request for information only. It is not an order. In addition, this RFI was never sent to Mountain House. This is to confirm that Mountain House is not supplying FEMA or any other Government agency with Mountain House #10 cans or pouches.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) procures and stores pre-packaged commercial meals to support readiness capability for immediate distribution to disaster survivors routinely. The purpose of this Request for Information is to identify sources of supply for meals in support of disaster relief efforts based on a catastrophic disaster event within the New Madrid Fault System for a survivor population of 7M to be utilized for the sustainment of life during a 10-day period of operations.
As you know we have removed #10 cans from our website temporarily. The reason for this is sales of #10 cans have continued to increase. OFD is allocating as much production capacity as possible to this market segment, but we must maintain capacity for our other market segments as well.
Currently our inventory for both cans and pouches is all being shipped to our retailers. Once all of our retailers are back in stock 100%, we will put items back in stock on our own website. For our #10 cans, we do have a small number of dealers that you can contact for future ordering of our food storage items. Although they are not taking any orders at this time, we do suggest you contact them to see how you can be notified as soon as they are in a position to once again accept new orders. For a list of those dealers, please contact us at MH-Info@ofd.com
We expect this situation to be necessary for several months although this isn’t a guarantee. We will update this information as soon as we know more. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience. We sincerely hope you will continue to be Mountain House customers in the future.
According to two distributers that I’ve been buying from for about a year or so, Mountain House was selling their goods to anyone and everyone. They had several hundred resellers carrying their products. As demand rose, none of the resellers was receiving enough product.
Mountain has chosen just a very few distributors to handle their products and now it’s a matter of building inventory between those distributors. At least that was the way it was explained to me.
Just yesterday I received parts of an order (3 cases of #10 cans) that was placed over 6 weeks ago. There was no indication of when the rest of the backorder (about 15 cases) would be filled. I have every confidence that it will be filled, the company (Emergency Essentials.com) seems to be on top of customer service, it just takes some patience.
If emergency food storage is something you have thought about, I suggest starting now. I would rather be ready years too early, instead of one day too late. It really does take some thought though, plan your work, work your plan. If you live in the country and have a garden, livestock, etc., those #10 cans are what you may need. If you live in a condo in the city, you have a whole other set of circumstances and you may want to preposition those cans in a location that you intend to bug out to when the SHTF. In that scenario, you need to have a backpack preloaded with MRE’s, first aid supplies, and other emergency supplies. You will need to have some fuel stored as well as emergency cash. There won’t be any gas stations open or ATM’s.