Bulk Food

In Bush Alaska, some of us do our shopping a bit differently than the rest of America. We do our best to buy enough basic groceries to last us 9 months time. The store in Brevig is actually pretty nice and supplies us with some basics like juice, frozen pizza, eggs, potatoes, etc. But there's not a lot of variety and it's a bit less expensive to buy it in Anchorage and ship it north. We end up buying from a couple different places.

First, in August, C.O. and I each take a grocery cart and walk up and down every aisle at Fred Meyer and estimate about how much of each product we'll use over the winter. We usually heap three carts worth of food and other basic supplies before we're done. Then, check out, bring our carts to customer service and have them ship it all to Brevig for us. Once upon time, we would box up all of it, go to the post office and ship it our selves but really, that's madness. Now we leave that to the experts. It costs 8% extra but is well worth it.

The other method of shopping is a service we just started using called, Span Alaska. They specialize in bulk food. They're like Sam's Club, but they deliver. We can't buy everything from them, since their selection is limited and we often don't need quite as much as they offer in a package (see photo below, oops, I over ordered on the Tabasco). But for some things, they're perfect. We use a lot of cereal, crackers, paper products, bacon, butter, chicken etc. So, we buy these sort of things from Span. These are photos of just SOME of our groceries for the coming winter.

Since we have so much food to store, we tend to squirrel it away in all kinds of odd places throughout the house. But it works. In fact, it's so handy that I think I'd prefer to buy this way even if we lived else where. One thing we've found is important to remember is to date the food when you buy it so you can use up last year's supply before cracking into the new stuff.

--AnnMarie