Food reserves
How much, of what, and why a fortnight costs less than one weekly shop.
You already have more than you think, and the gap is smaller than the advice implies. Most European households are carrying four to six days of food without having planned any of it. The job is not to build a store from nothing. It is to find the gap and close it deliberately.
Unlike water, where the three countries disagree sharply, food guidance is broadly consistent on the shape and differs mainly on the duration and on how much detail anyone is willing to publish.
The three official positions
| Authority | Duration | Calorie basis | Published breakdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany — BBK / BLE | 10 days | 2,200 kcal per person per day | Yes, by category, plus an online calculator |
| Austria — Zivilschutzverband | 14 days | 2,000 kcal per person per day | Yes, by category, as a 14-day total |
| Switzerland — BWL | around one week | not published | No weights — a named product list and a calculator |
What to actually store
Austria publishes the most usable single table: the total for one person for fourteen days.
| Category | Per person, 14 days |
|---|---|
| Grain products — pasta, rice, flour, bread, potatoes | 4.5 kg |
| Vegetables and fruit, including tinned and dried | 6.0 kg |
| Dairy — UHT milk, hard cheese, tinned | 4.5 kg |
| Meat and fish, mostly tinned | 2.0 kg |
| Oils and fats | 0.5 kg |
| Water and other drinks | 21 litres |
The Austrian guidance gives the macronutrient target behind it as roughly 60 per cent carbohydrate and 12 per cent protein, the remainder fat. Germany's figures are per day rather than per fortnight — 0.33 kg of grain products, 0.40 kg of vegetables including pulses, 0.25 kg of fruit, 0.25 kg of dairy, 0.12 kg of meat, fish and eggs, and about 33 g of fats and oil — which is the more useful form if your household is not two people.
Germany's calculator at ernaehrungsvorsorge.de runs from one to 28 days for one to ten people and will do the arithmetic. Switzerland has one too, at notvorratsrechner.bwl.admin.ch. Austria publishes tables only.
Two ways to hold it, and only one of them works
Germany names both models. A one-off store is bought once, put away, and checked against its best-before dates on a fixed date each year. A rolling store is ordinary food you eat and replace, kept deeper than you otherwise would.
The rolling store is the one that survives contact with real life. A one-off store is a cupboard of things nobody likes, which is why it is still there three years later, and why half of it gets thrown away. The test Germany applies to each item is worth copying: is it durable, is it ready or near-ready, does it have a short cooking time, and will the people in this household actually eat it? An item that fails the fourth question is not a reserve. It is waste with a delay.
The Swiss point everyone else misses
Switzerland's list is the least quantified of the three and contains the single most practical instruction: store food that can be eaten cold. The reasoning is stated plainly — if the power fails and you have no non-electric way to heat anything, a cupboard of dried pasta and rice is close to worthless.
This is the point where the food category and the power category meet, and it is the most common gap we see. A fortnight of food that all requires twenty minutes of boiling, in a flat with an electric hob and no camping stove, is a fortnight of food you cannot eat. Fix one or the other: hold some tinned and ready-to-eat food, or own a gas cooker approved for indoor use.
If you live in a small flat
Austria answers this directly, and it is the only guidance of the three that does: if you have no storage room, halve the quantities. The reserve then covers roughly one week rather than two. That is a legitimate position, not a failure — a week of food in a city flat is far better than a fortnight of food in a plan you never execute.
What it costs
| Item | Approximate cost |
|---|---|
| 14-day reserve, one person, built from ordinary supermarket stock | €60–90 |
| Same, two people | €120–180 |
| Freeze-dried or long-life specialist food, 14 days, one person | €150–350 |
| Camping stove plus gas cartridges | €30–70 |
A fortnight of food for a couple, built from the supermarket, costs roughly one and a half weekly shops — and because a rolling store is eaten and replaced, the real cost is the one-off outlay to go deeper, not a recurring expense. Specialist long-life food has its place for the part of the store you genuinely never rotate, but it costs two to four times as much per day and most households should not start there.
Three things to do this week
1. Count what is in the cupboard in days, not items. Most people find four to six.
2. Identify everything that needs more than ten minutes of cooking, and ask how you would heat it with no electricity. If the answer is "I couldn't", that is the gap.
3. On the next big shop, buy double of six things you already eat and have a long date. That is the rolling store started, and it is the whole technique.
Sources. Germany: BBK, Bevorraten and the BLE Vorratskalkulator. Austria: Zivilschutzverband, Bevorratung. Switzerland: BWL, Kluger Rat — Notvorrat and the Notvorrats-Rechner. Figures checked 31 October 2026.