Multilevel marketing structure with resulting high prices, but the quality of the basic freeze-dried foods is good. Can't speak to any ready meals or such like they may be selling now.

Nutristore sells a subset of their basic products at better prices.

 

My mother has a whole shelving unit of it. Veggies, fruits, everything I think. She likes the healthy, all natural aspect of it. From what I've eaten, it's good quality. The fact that it's all single ingredients is kind of nice, rather than entre style, so you can make whatever meal you want to or use it as suplementation in regular meals. The grapes specifically are absolutely delicious and I could snack on them things all day.

 

The grapes specifically are absolutely delicious and I could snack on them things all day.

Just so you know, all the same grapes.

Thrive 19.25 ounce #10 cans bought by the case totaling 7.21 pounds with monthly delivery service cost $3.20 per ounce.

Nutristore 19.7 ounce #10 cans for $46.99 on Amazon come to $2.38 per ounce.

Northbay's identical freeze-dried sliced red grapes are temporarily out of stock, but cost $4.16 to $2.83 per ounce in mylar when available depending on the size bag you bought them in. However, if you really love them, you can buy a 20-pound bulk box from Northbay for $2.13 per ounce and snack away or package them for longer storage yourself. That's the equivalent of almost three cases of Thrive Life grapes for 33% less money.

And if you're into getting 20 pounds, Preparedirect shows the same box in stock at only $2.03 per ounce with the same free shipping as Northbay. Even with repacking in mylar with O2 absorbers you buy yourself, you could save around 15% off the Nutristore price and 55% off Thrive Life's price.

So if you really want to snack on those grapes, buy them under the Nutristore brand or someone else's rather than paying a third more just to make those Thrive Life "associates" rich. Thrive Life's products are very good with a great selection in ordinary times, but their pricing is decidedly not. If they offered their full line under the Nutristore brand name sans Thrive Life MLM inflated pricing, they would probably be the best storage food outlet going. But alas, they seem wedded to their multi-level marketing sales structure and have given no indication they will ever do that.

If you don't feel some overwhelming need for modern-day Tupperware parties and Avon sales ladies in your life, Thrive Life is not where you want to be buying your freeze-dried food if there is any other option for something. Their food is good, and it is clean label, but it is not that good. It's mostly just what everyone else is selling cheaper. (Everyone sells identical looking sliced red grapes and peel-on Fuji apple slices and peel-on Granny Smith apple chunks because they're all buying those wholesale from the same freeze drier.)

Thrive Life does occasionally have a product others aren't offering yet, but freeze-dried sliced red grapes aren't one of them and never have been. Both Emergency Essentials and Honeyville had them before Thrive Life, and it may have been even before Northbay. I remember buying some in cans way back and eventually discovering that over time they tend to congeal into a solid sugar block if not packaged with desiccant in addition to O2 absorber (just a word to the wise for anyone not eating them all up fast).

If you want sliced freeze-dried grape snacks still in great shape way down the road, add a specifically low-moisture oxygen absorber to a crisp-dry bag of Northbay grapes packaged with a desiccant. Then you can use your chisel for other things besides digging grape sugar blocks out of a can after SHTF.

 

Look at their serving size, about half to the size of Mountain House. Savings is marginal, maybe even more expensive.

 

I think you need to try some for yourself. Small serving size usually cost more but if it taste bad to you, then you are out cheap before you have a lot to toss or trade. I bought a case of Mainstay bars because Datrex bars shot by like 80%. Well I can barely hack the taste of this batch of Mainstay (tastes like raw cookie doe). I actually like the taste of Datrex bars and should have paid the price.

 

Never comparison shop based on either "serving" sizes or can sizes. Serving size is highly variable depending on what the company wants to call a serving, and what's in a can depends on how full they fill their can.

Go by weight for basic ingredients. That is the only way to get a true comparison, use price per ounce.

When it comes to prepared meals, if you buy such, look to total calories and total grams of protein, fat, and carbs to figure what you're actually getting for your money from one vendor versus another. Then check the full ingredient lists to see if it is all stuff you want to be eating.

 

Again, compare to Mountain House.
These days I could care less. I make my own low carb, high protein freeze dried meals to whatever size is best for me. I control everything and it's good for 25 years.

 

Thrive Life aka Nutristore is a good product (Nutristore is Thrive Life without the multi level marketing scheme so it is cheaper). I have actually had orders of Nutristore come in Thrive Life boxes. Costco.com carried a good variety of their product before COVID. Since COVID hit, it has been hit or miss on selection. Same with their Mountain House brand. They carried a lot of stock at much more affordable rates then COVID came.

Apologies, I guess I am old school mentioning COVID. It is now all Putin's fault.

 

If you're looking for canned basic staples, check out the LDS food stores, the prices are less that Thrive, with approximately the same storage life.

 

What items do you intend to buy?

Some items look "reasonably" priced to me, especially if you stock them in smaller amounts. On the other hand they have instant rice for $13.30 a pound. I just bought 20 pounds of rice yesterday for $11 something. That could be packed in mylar and still be under $1 per pound. (I am comparing instant rice to regular rice so the comparison isn't perfect)

Many of there other items are very expensive becuse you are paying a premium for freeze drying, which you have to decide if it is worth it for you. But most of those items you won't be buying literal tons of like you will of grains and beans. So the high price may be a little easier to swing.

 

Many of there other items are very expensive becuse you are paying a premium for freeze drying, which you have to decide if it is worth it for you. But most of those items you won't be buying literal tons of like you will of grains and beans. So the high price may be a little easier to swing.

Just to be clear, all freeze-dried food is more expensive than the same item dehydrated because freeze-drying takes much more energy and generally more time. The quality when rehydrated, however, is much closer to fresh since it's the same as that food frozen and defrosted. And the price may not be more, or at least not much more, than fresh or frozen conventional food depending on the item. The high cost of Thrive Life is due more to multilevel marketing than the fact they are selling freeze-dried food, which you can see by comparing their prices per ounce to that of other people selling the same freeze-dried item.

To compare to fresh food, you have to take the price per pound for fresh produce and then calculate the percent yield of edible produce after peeling, coring, trimming, etc. since that's all been done before freeze-drying or dehydrating (or conventional freezing or canning). For that, you can use this handy USDA table of food yields:
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Data/Classics/ah102.pdf
Divide the fresh price per pound by the average percent yield to get the equivalent price per pound for frozen food. Use drained weight of can contents to compare canned food.

Then for freeze-dried (or crisp dehydrated) food, you need to also account for the weight of the removed water. To do that, go to the USDA food composition tables online or use this site, which is easier to navigate and shows the same numbers:
SELF Nutrition Data | Food Facts, Information & Calorie Calculator
Look up your food and set the portion size for 100 grams. Then check how many grams of water are in that 100 grams (it's shown down towards the bottom on the right), which is your percent water in the fresh food. Freeze-drying or dehydrating will still leave 2% to 3% water in the item. So subtract 3 grams of water from the grams shown and then subtract the answer from 100 to get your freeze-dried/dehydrated weight per 100 grams fresh. Divide by 100 (move your decimal place right 2 spaces, so 20 becomes .20) to get decimal percent and then divide your trimmed price per pound by that to get the final equivalent price of fresh to your freeze-dried/dehydrated food.

Your real cost differential is the plus/minus between those two numbers, price per ounce freeze-dried/dehydrated versus price per ounce of fresh adjusted for trimming and water content. For comparing to frozen or canned, you need only do the water content adjustment on the price per ounce of those foods since they are also trimmed and prepped for eating.

Take your final adjusted fresh price per pound/ounce and look at what you are being charged per pound/ounce for the freeze-dried or dehydrated. In many cases, you will realize the stuff is not nearly as expensive as you at first thought.

Then consider how often the raspberries or blackberries at the bottom of a basket turn out going soft or moldy, and you'll figure out expensive bramble fruits are one place where freeze-dried can save you money as well as giving you convenience and long storage life. There will be some other surprises when you do the math, and with real price comparisons in hand, you will be in a much better position to figure out how to do your pantry and food storage most economically.

 

Along the line of Liebrecht's comment, I'm going to make an addendum to my post above. Buyer beware when it comes to both price and price per ounce in those Thrive Life cans, and doubly beware if setting up a subscription!

When I bought a couple of things from them somewhere between 5 and 7 years ago, prices were a bit high, but they had a few things no one else was selling freeze-dried then, so I bit the bullet on some of a couple of those. Other than premium price, not a bad experience, although I wasn't about to buy anything from them I could get elsewhere or that was also being sold under their Nutristore label for less.

Revisit just now proved a) their latest software update completely screwed up any older accounts, and b) the pyramid scheme must really be making bucks for their reps these days, because when I got a magnifying glass out and checked the weight in the cans of red peppers on "special," it turned out that both on sale AND if you were willing to lock yourself into monthly deliveries you would need to go into the site to amend, suspend, or stop in time before the next shipment, the markup was still 100% over similar product elsewhere. That's a lot of unnecessary extra bucks to be handing over to the folks at the top of their pyramid.

And I gave up on the one thing I went there to buy because it turned out an apparently accepted order can result in a notice 12 hours or more later that it didn't go through for some unspecified reason you are left to figure out when you try again, rinse and repeat, and then in the end, you can get charged for that order a solid day after you receive a notice saying it had been cancelled because it couldn't process on multiple attempts. Any email communication with customer service (their recommended form of communication) is now met with a form reply saying they're very busy and will get back to you sometime in the unspecified future, and calling resulted in an hour's wait on speakerphone for someone to finally pick up. (And you can only get someone on the phone at all during business hours on weekdays, no weekend/off hour coverage.)

Admittedly, that person was apparently the only really helpful one at the company and claims to have really cancelled the cancelled order and returned my money, but I had ended up buying elsewhere when I finally found what I wanted at another site on one last search, no subscription required, for $20 less for the same amount by weight in their case with a subscription (and $60 less if you don't want to have to set up a subscription and immediately cancel it after the first order).

The only reason I even knew they had actually processed a charge for an order they had told me was cancelled the day before was that I went to pay my credit card bill the same day they put it through. Otherwise I would have been oblivious until the unexpected box showed up. Needless to say, I won't be ordering there again. Six or seven years ago it was just an annoyance having to set up a subscription just to cancel it again and to pay a bit of a premium on price. Now it's a lot of premium on many prices, and a company I would not trust with a subscription of any kind.

So that's NYMin's updated opinion on Thrive Life. YMMV, obviously a number of people's does, but that's mine. Guess it just goes to show that only recent experiences really count when judging a company.

PS: I finally just got an answer to my weekend email. That customer service rep was both snippy and totally unhelpful. So I guess I got lucky on the phone, but since you can't control who you get on a call, that doesn't really improve my opinion of the company. As I said, caveat emptor, proceed at your own risk. And if you do want to order there, make sure to check how much is in the can and price per ounce for each and every offering and compare it to price per ounce other places. Their price differential has reached truly outrageous in at least some cases.

 

To Expand on the Above: We'll take apples as an example and work in reverse.

Recent LDS price was $62.45 for a case of 6 lbs dehydrated apples, or $10.41/lb. An average apple has 85% water, so crisp dehydrated is 18% the weight of fresh (100 - (85 - 3), which makes $10.41 a pound for crisp dehydrated equivalent to $1.87 per pound of fresh peeled, cored, and trimmed of any defects (10.41*.18). That's your comparison price for frozen apple slices or canned drained apples.

But if you buy a bag of fresh apples, none of that preparing has been done. The average loss after prep for apples is 7% for skin, 8% for cores and stems, and 7% for defects. Assume you bought almost perfect store apples, and make it just 1% for any defects for a total loss of 16% of their weight in prep. So it's $1.87 * 0.84 for a comparison price of $1.57 a pound. If it's a bushel basket with a more average level of imperfections, it would be $1.87 * 0.78 or $1.46/lb. Of course, you haven't spent any time prepping those LDS apples, and you haven't paid for any electric or gas to get them crisp dry or any additional mylar bags and O2 absorbers to preserve them. And on the other hand, depending on how much you order, shipping costs could add up to 50 cents per pound to your dried apples, or $1.96/lb for peeled, cored and trimmed or $1.69 to $1.53/lb equivalent for fresh maximum equivalent costs. Looking at store apple prices here, the LDS apples are a good deal. YMMV depending on where you are, but they are certainly the most economical choice in cans ready to store.

Freeze-dried? Let's look at Northbay's freeze-dried apples in mylar bags with desiccant. You would need to snip a corner off the bag and add an oxygen absorber to those and reseal for long-term storage, although they're good for a year in the pantry as is. If you can wait, you will eventually see them offered at 10% off list as most of their products eventually are in the course of a year or two, but we'll go with current list in their larger bags. Their diced freeze-dried apples in 1.2 pound mylar bags are $3.549/ounce (they do that math for you). Their Fuji apple slices are $3.281/oz in 1 lb bags and their Granny Smith apple chunks are $2.603/oz in 1.5 lb bags, but we'll go with the dices for now. So the equivalent of the 6 lbs of LDS dehydrated apples would be 5 bags exactly of Northbay's diced freeze-dried apples at a cost of $56.78/pound and $283.92 for 6 pounds (or $52.50/pound and $314.98 for 6 pounds of Fujis or $41.65/pound and $249.88 for 6 pounds of Granny Smiths). For fresh apples, the equivalent would be $8.59 to $7.97 per pound. (And now you know why I use dehydrated where dehydrated works as well as freeze-dried. Don't make your emergency food applesauce from freeze-dried apples. )

What about freeze-dried apples from Thrive Life? They only show Fuji apple slices, 8.46 oz per #10 can and $207.99/case of 6 cans with a total of 3.17 pounds per case if you sign up for monthly deliveries, or $244.69 if you don't. That's $4.10 per ounce to $4.82 per ounce depending on how you buy (plus additional shipping costs you need to add to the $4.82 price because shipping is only free on orders with monthly delivery service, but we'll skip that for now), and that $4.10 is with the current 15% off sale added to the monthly delivery price discount. That comes to 27% to 47% more than Northbay's Fuji slices (and 39% to 63% more than Northbay when their Fuji's are on their own 10% off sale list for the month). And any order over $99 comes with free delivery from Northbay.

Some of that price difference you can ascribe to cans versus mylar bags, but most of it is due to Thrive Life's multilevel marketing business model.

For instance, let's look at Honeyville freeze dried apples in cans, neither the best nor the worst pricewise among the competition, but easy to calculate because they, like the LDS, have a fixed shipping cost. They only offer Granny Smith chunks at the moment (everybody's inventory is a bit spotty these days). They sell a case of 6 cans containing 8 ounces per can, 3 pounds total (Honeyville's cans are always a little underfilled to make their per can prices look better) for $121.45 with $8.99 fixed shipping per order, so $2.72 per ounce if you order only one case. So that's $2.60 per ounce from Northbay for Granny Smith's in mylar without an oxygen absorber and $2.72 per ounce from Honeyville for the same freeze-dried Granny Smith apple chunks in cans with an oxygen absorber. That pretty much reflects just the difference in packaging costs. Therefore, the difference between Northbay's $3.28 per ounce for Fuji apples plus 12 cents for cans instead of mylar bags, $3.40 per ounce, and Thrive Life's $4.10 per ounce for Fuji apples represents a 21% markup to support Thrive's multilevel marketing sales structure. .

And that is how you comparison shop storage foods. Once you are looking at all the adjusted costs per ounce for the various products from various suppliers, you can then weigh up comparative tastiness, suitability for various uses, convenience, comparative shelf lives, etc. and make your own well-informed buying choices for your pantry. While you're at it, you can also figure out what you will save versus cost of equipment and time and effort you will expend to do your own canning, dehydrating, or freeze-drying for mid-term or long-term storage. Different people will have different opinions on whether doing any or all of those themselves is or isn't worth it, but at least if you do the math, yours will be a more informed opinion than otherwise.