Building a one-year food supply with a freeze dryer

A year of food for one adult is roughly 1,800 to 2,200 lb of fresh produce put through the machine, which on a Blue Alpine Medium at 10 lb a cycle is about 200 cycles. At one cycle a day that is seven months of continuous running. Plan for two years, not one summer.

The arithmetic nobody does first

This is the calculation that changes people’s plans, so it is worth doing before you buy anything. An adult eating around 2,000 calories a day needs roughly 1,800 to 2,200 lb of fresh food equivalent per year, depending enormously on what that food is.

	Per adult, one year
Fresh food equivalent	1,800–2,200 lb
Cycles on a Medium at 10 lb	180–220
Cycles on a Large at 20 lb	90–110
Electricity at $6.05/cycle (Medium)	$1,090–$1,330
Packaging, ~10 bags/cycle at $0.72	$1,300–$1,580
Elapsed time at 1 cycle/day	6–7 months of continuous running

Which is why almost nobody freeze dries a whole year

The sensible approach, and what experienced preppers actually do, is to buy the calorie base and freeze dry the quality. Rice, beans, oats, flour and sugar are already shelf-stable for decades, cost very little, and provide the bulk of the calories. Putting them through a freeze dryer adds almost nothing.

What a freeze dryer adds is everything those staples lack: fruit, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat and complete meals. Nutrition, variety and morale. That is a much smaller volume and a much better use of 200 cycles.

A realistic one-year plan

Category	Source	Roughly
Grain, rice, pasta, legumes	Buy in bulk, store in mylar	60% of calories
Cooking oil, fats	Buy, rotate often	10% of calories
Fruit and vegetables	Freeze dry	~40 cycles
Meat and eggs	Freeze dry	~40 cycles
Dairy	Freeze dry, rotate	~15 cycles
Complete meals	Freeze dry	~25 cycles
Salt, sugar, spices	Buy, effectively indefinite	—

At 120 cycles that is roughly two or three batches a week for a year — demanding but achievable alongside normal life, and it produces a store with real variety rather than 200 bags of the same thing.

Do not forget the water

Freeze-dried food needs water to rehydrate, and quite a lot of it. A year of freeze-dried food with no water plan is not a year of food. Budget roughly 80% of the water you removed to put it back, on top of drinking water.