Food Grade Buckets

The Grain Mill of Wake Forest's food grade high-density polyethylene (HDPE) buckets are the perfect solution to your long term storage needs. Our buckets feature an easy-on, easy-off screw top lid. The "Life Latch" feature ensures that your buckets stay tightly closed and secure until you're ready to open them. 

Each five gallon bucket hold approximately 38 lbs of grain, 35 lbs of rice, 20 lbs of oatmeal, and 60 lbs of salt.

Buckets are currently in very limited availability due to current worldwide economic and political climates. Please call 919-526-4573 or use the Contact Me form in the upper righthand corner of this website.

Other Bucket Solutions and Alternatives

The purpose of high density polyethylene plastic is to create an oxygen free environment inside the bucket. The density of the plastic allows for virtually no oxygen transference from the outside environment. Any container that has a triangle with a 2 inside is HDPE and is suitable for longer term storage as long as the cap/lid/closure is a guaranteed airtight seal.

An alternative to storing in HDPE is to mylar bag your long term food with oxygen absorbers in small, easily used amounts and store it in a vermin proof container. This could be something as simple as a Rubbermaid container or a cheap bucket from Lowes or Home Depot. Do not use the cheap buckets from Lowes or Home Depot without mylar. The buckets are a low density plastic and will reoxygenate within a year or two.

Lowes now offers an HDPE bucket that is suitable for direct food storage (click here for link).

Mylar oxygen barrier bags are made of multiple layers of plastic and thin metal and provide a superior level of protection from oxygen, but are subject to puncturing or gnawing by rodents if left exposed in a pantry or on a shelf. 

If you want to store large amounts, 55 gallon drums with locking lids can be found on Craigslist for $10 - $30 that give you 11x the storage capacity of a 5 gallon bucket. 1 gallon bags can be stacked in easily accessed layers inside the drum.

I currently have some used knuckle-buster HDPE food grade buckets available for sale. They are $2 ea with a lid. They contained a pelleted (not liquid) pond weed killer which the manufacturer says is not a threat or harm to humans, only duckweed. I must recommend washing them well with a mild bleach solution and using mylar oxygen barrier bags if you choose this low-cost option. The price is right though, and for a little over $4, you can store 5 gallons of food.