Food storage calculator

CALORIES AND WATER, PER PERSON, PER DAY

Enter who's in your household and how many days you want to cover. The math is the same one we walk through in the food storage post: 2,000 calories per adult per day, 1,500 per child, and 1 gallon of water per person per day.

ADULTS CHILDREN (UNDER 12) DAYS TO COVER

Total calories–

Water–

As dry staples (rice, beans, oats)–

Staple weight assumes roughly 1,600 calories per pound, the ballpark for rice, beans, and oats. Real pantries mix in canned goods and fats, so treat it as a floor, not a shopping list. Add extra water for pets, hot climates, and anyone pregnant or nursing.

What the numbers mean

The calorie line is your target, not your menu. A two-week target for a family of four comes out to 112,000 calories: roughly 65 to 70 pounds of dry staples, or two totes in the basement. The water line is the one most households are furthest from; a case of bottled water is about 3 gallons, so divide your number by three to count cases.

Three days covers a storm outage (here's what actually goes in a 72-hour kit). Two weeks is the baseline most emergency agencies recommend. Past a month you're building a deep pantry, and rotation starts to matter more than buying: things have to get eaten and replaced before they expire.

Knowing the target is the easy half

The hard half is knowing where you stand against it six months from now, after the pantry has been eaten from, restocked, and reorganized twice. That's the job BeaglePrep does: set your household size once, log what's on the shelves, and the Prep Score shows your days of supply per category against these same numbers. Get BeaglePrep free on Android and see how many days you've actually got.