Provisioning In the Virgin Islands - Sourcing Bulk Dried Foods

[lsheaf]

I’m preparing for a voyage south of the Virgin Islands sometime early next year.

For anyone passing through the Virgin Islands, food is too expensive to stock up from local food stores, and the quality is sporadic. That’s my opinion unless you have a lot of money and don’t care. Air shipping items is too expensive for large food orders.

Here’s the alternative:

There is a local hardware store on St. John that ships containers via tropical shipping out of Florida every week. If you ask, they will provide you with their freight forwarders address in Florida. You send your goods to that address, they package your stuff on the container, and the local hardware store notifies you once the package is unloaded off their trailer on St. John. It gets better. Their freight forwarder takes pictures of every item before it’s loaded in case it is damaged or lost during shipping. They also take care of all the customs paperwork and fees. The hardware store charges a flat rate of 5 dollars a cubic foot as of now. You can send whatever you want through them as long as it fits in a 40ft container.

I’m now stocking up on dried foods and came across this one vendor which I really like. I ordered close to 60 pounds of dried goods in total. Pricing is good as well as shipping to Florida. They seem to carry a lot of organic stuff at affordable prices if you’re into that, which I am.

https://countrylifefoods.com/

I hope this can help someone who is planning a future trip to the Caribbean.

[CapnK]

Great info, thanks!!!