The Ready Store is the ideal emergency preparedness store, and it earns our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award for its fantastic array of dehydrated meals, freeze-dried foods and survival equipment. Not only are you relying on The Ready Store for your emergency preparedness needs, so is our government. The Department of Homeland Security, various federal agencies, state governments and city governments rely on this store for emergency foods, water and supplies, survival kits and evacuation supplies. The Ready Store is continually helping their customers make wise food storage decisions.
Due to recent natural disasters, dehydrated meals, freeze-dried foods and other emergency preparedness items are in high demand. The Ready Store offers you food storage from both the Mountain House brand and their own label, Saratoga Farms.
The Ready Store has a large variety of food storage choices, including pasta, vegetables, meat substitutes (TVP), high caloric bars, breakfasts, snacks, grains and flours, sauces and seasonings and much more. While we love all of these freeze-dried and dehydrated meal options, our favorite foods are the main entrée selections. Saratoga Farm's delicious Broccoli Cheddar Soup, for example, is an entire meal in a can; all you have to do is add water.
Although ready-made food is primarily associated with food storage, The Ready Store also offers a seeds and plants category, which is such a brilliant idea. This wise food storage idea allows you to purchase a seed kit, such as the MegaGarden, which has almost 300,000 seeds! Your garden could yield fresh vegetables and fruit that you could bottle and add to your current supply. Fresh veggies and fruits will be a refreshing addition to any dehydrated meal.
Food storage is extremely important, of course, but you should also consider survival equipment. The Ready Store has an excellent selection of emergency preparedness items. If you do not know exactly what emergency preparedness "situation" items you should be collecting, we suggest you browse one of their 12 emergency preparedness categories, each with items specific to the disaster (minor to devastating). These categories are:
- Fire
- Flood
- Earthquake
- Hurricane
- Other Storm
- Tornado
- Auto Breakdown
- Biological Threat
- Financial Crisis
- Medical Emergency
- Nuclear Disaster
- Power Outage
In each category, you'll find products related to water and hydration, sanitation and hygiene, first aid and medical, as well as tools and supplies, generators and batteries and warmth and shelter. Indeed, the emergency preparedness items are numerous and diverse. It seems as if The Ready Store has thought of everything, including something for every situation.
If you have allergies, or have specific dietary needs, The Ready Store is a wise food storage option, as they have the best selection of specialty foods including:
- Gluten Free
- Vegetarian
- Lactose Free
- Pork Free
- Shellfish Free
- Soy Free
- Peanut Free
We love this emergency preparedness store, so allow us to gush about our (and soon to be your) favorite features. Each food product has its own page with a large image of the item, the price and a short description. Under this preliminary information, you get to the good stuff. Each product features five tabs:
- Benefits & Description
- What's in the Box
- Features & Specifications
- Recipes & Nutrition
- Customer Reviews
If you or a family member has allergies or are concerned with preservatives, the "Recipes & Nutrition" tab lists every ingredient, and those ingredients that people are most commonly allergic to, like milk or soy, are listed in bold type. The "Features & Specifications" tab lists the shelf life of an un-opened can and that of an opened can, total calories, water required, total servings and more. We also love the customer reviews, which rate the products on price, value and quality.
This emergency preparedness store delivers on providing quality food storage products and survival equipment to its customers and has a fantastic website. We were disappointed that this site does not provide you with a food storage calculator, which calculates the volume of food storage you need based on the number of people in your family and how many calories they require. The Ready Store does provide a 14-page PDF booklet that you and your family can go through together. This ReadySteps booklet has seven steps to emergency preparedness:
- ReadyPlan
- ReadyShelter
- ReadyWater
- ReadyRecipes
- ReadyStorage
- ReadyFinances
- GoReady
The Ready Store emergency preparedness website is perfectly organized with categories, tabs and topics. For example, you can click on the "Beans & Legumes" tab and navigate to their main page. Each item is listed with a picture, title, brief description and price of the product. When you find the product you're looking for, you can add it to your cart for a speedy checkout or add it to your wishlist for a later purchase. We love that there is a customer favorite's selection at the top of each page. If you are new to purchasing emergency preparedness supplies, this is a great reference to see what others have tried and liked.
Even more than this "browse by category" feature, we appreciate the "filter items by" section, which allows you quickly to locate the item you came to the site to find. You can filter items by:
- Persons Supplied
- Supply Duration
- Food Type
- Shelf Life
- Packaging
- Brand
- Allergen & Specialty
- Regular Price
This emergency preparedness store continued to impresses us as we moved through the site. After navigating through the site and reading the descriptions of the products, we finally made a decision on what to purchase. Once you click the big, red "add to cart" button, your screen will wash out and you'll be informed that your items have been successfully added to the cart . You then have the option to continue shopping or view your cart and checkout. If your cart is just short of a specific dollar amount that allows you free shipping or a discount, a pop-up window will inform you. This is a truly great feature for you to save money. Overall, the checkout process was very simple and we were extremely pleased with the whole process.
This emergency preparedness store knows that people will have questions regarding products they are interested in, the checkout process or their order history. On every page, this emergency preparedness store has a live chat button, technical phone number and social media buttons for you to easily access. The live chat support was excellent and their response time was great. They linked us to the product and information pages we were looking for and answered all of our questions. The "ReadyBlog" was another fantastic source of information; we found articles with tips on tornado preparedness, the best temperature to store freeze-dried food, how to purify water and so much more.
The Ready Store is extremely well organized, which makes what could be a complicated online shopping session a breeze. They offer an outstanding array of emergency preparedness goods, including food storage, MRE meals, survival kits, water storage and even survival equipment that is specific to different emergency situations. You will have no trouble finding what you need, when you need it. We are confident that you and your family will love working with The Ready Store.
