So for the past few months one of my local surplus/overstock grocery stores has been selling “food kits.” At first I didn’t pay attention to the printing on the boxes and assumed that the store was making them up themselves from excess inventory. But now the other local surplus place is selling them, too. I finally read a box and they are made up by a place called GA Foods.
Each box has 2 full-size cans of Chef Boyardee mini-ravioli, a shelf-stable drink box of milk, a single-serving cereal pack, 3 cups of diced peaches, and a cereal bar. Also a small packet of some sort of cookies–some have been Nila Wafers, some have been Famous Amos Chocolate Chip and some sort of other snack–some have had a fruit bar, some a pack of Pop Tarts. Some have packets of saltines, some don’t. All have packets of peanuts, Texas Pete hot sauce, plastic ware/napkin packets, and moist towelette packets.
The boxes sell for $1.50 each. I know that groceries have a markup, but that still seems like it would be below cost for the contents. Both stores have pallets full of the kits. I’m wondering who they were aimed at. Unused disaster relief supplies? Except the cans of soup imply that the recipient is expected to have water and a means of heating it. The food is all on the junky end of the spectrum, too. Any ideas/thoughts?
(The first of the stores also sometimes sells MREs–the kind with the self-heating pouches–for $1.50, which is probably also below cost.)
Ain’t no “probably” about it. MREs go for better than $7/ea in case lots.
If they were selling them for any less than $10/ea, they were grossly expired or badly stored and well past their use dates.
As for the generic stuff the store is selling - who knows? But for $1.50/ea, it might just be worth it to grab a weeks-worth. Check the “Sell By” dates first.
They sell surplus food. The kits are being sold below their initial cost because the original seller couldn’t sell them and had pallets of them. They sold the food kits to the surplus/overstock store at a loss, such that the surplus/overstock store could sell them for $1.50 and still make a profit.
Chef Boyardee mini-ravioli isn’t soup. While better heated, they can be – and often are – eaten unheated. (Not by me though. Actually, I don’t eat them heated either.)
ETA: I like MRE’s. (I’ve never had to like them!) Last I saw them in a military surplus store, they were about $8 each – without the heater.
If the use by date isn’t too close, I would buy them. I live a long way from anything other than a liquor store who only has potato chips and corn nuts as food.
I like emergency rations to have around the house. My Son would buy those MREs in a heart beat.
Yea, where is this place?
The MREs I tried out of curiosity (not bad, and I kind of enjoyed the heating process of dumping the packet of salt water into the packet of magnesium, finally learned about the delightful “rock or something” illustration) were made in 2016, had years to go on their expiration date.
Grabbing one of the soup cans (I’ve bought several boxes) expiration is in September 2019. Other stuff probably similar freshness.
Addressing other posters, I’m familiar with eating the soup straight from the can–used to do it in college when I didn’t want to bother with the immersion heater coil thingy, and the stores are in South Carolina and aren’t chains, so for most it would be a bit of a commute.)
When I worked in San Bernardino, I’d put the main dish of an MRE on my car’s dashboard in the morning. When I came out at lunchtime and opened it, it would be steaming.
You do understand, don’t you, that sell-by date has absolutely no significance except to notify the buyer that after that date, the seller will no longer guarantee the quality of the product, which includes appearance of the container. It is not intended, nor does it imply, that the contents are not safe, tasty, or nutritious after that date.
That’s an odd kind of heater. The ones I’ve seen, after inserting the ration you pour an ounce or so of fresh water into a pouch with a porous packet of salt, iron, and magnesium already in it.
I can’t find the link any more but Natick Labs, the folks in charge of developing MREs, did tests and found the shelf life depended greatly on the storage temperature. 40-degrees or less (but not freezing) they could last 120 months or more; above 110 it was more like 6 months. The deterioration was cumulative. Two months at 110 then moving the rations to 40 meant the life had been cut to 80 months (one third off). That’s why buying surplussed MREs is a gamble – they might have spent a year in an Iraqi uncontrolled environment warehouse for a year before being pulled.
At that, though, the main concern was palatability. The rations would deteriorate to the point where only the truly desperate would eat them before the nutrition was devalued, never mind becoming dangerous.
You do understand, don’t you, that just because food doesn’t go deadly the instance it passes its sell-by date, it doesn’t necessarily stay palatable and may become unsafe to eat at some point, and that the sell-by date does tell you something about its age?
For those of you waiting on tenterhooks for an update on this, both stores continue to stock these food boxes. They seem to have run out of the brown cardboard boxes and now have white boxes, which actually have a bit more stuff–this is what you get for $1.50. I still wonder what exactly the company was gearing up for but they must have had a pretty large order that went bust.
My local food outlet store has also recently sold those boxes. I thought it looked like prepacked food to send home with kids for weekend supplements since they aren’t getting free breakfast and lunch at school. Many schools supply these care packages to those kids who otherwise might not eat on the weekends. Locally my church puts together the packs, but it would be cheaper just to buy them pre-made.
The boxes include a couple breakfast bars, a bottle of water, the meal in the smaller, single-serving microwavable can, fruit snacks, shelf-stable milk, etc.
Wow, that is a lot of food for a buck-fifty. It’s not the kind of stuff I usually eat (I like to cook) but if I saw that I’d be tempted to buy a few and squirrel them away for emergencies.
That’s a lot of food for $1.50! It’s not gourmet, but it would certainly keep someone alive.
We have a local grocery store chain (Winco, for any in the PNW) that’s selling just the heaters from MREs for $.98. Obviously, they’d heat an MRE, but what else could they heat? Like could someone put an open can of soup on it and it would heat it? I should just buy a few and experiment but thought I’d ask.
We’re talking about a guy who eats out of dumpsters and picks up random turkeys he finds on the side of the road – I don’t think his idea of food safety is the same as most people.