Opening dates have been announced for Costco in Sydney and now even in Canberra – both scheduled to open in July 2011.

After watching the success of the Melbourne store opening, Sydney residents have been patiently waiting for the Auburn facility to be constructed.  Obviously Melbourne was a bigger success that expected, for Costco to also announce a Canberra store due to open at the same time as Sydney.

Whilst we’ve had smaller big box groceries targetted at businesses (e.g. Cambell’s Cash and Carry), Costco would be the first to target the consumer and on a scale not seen before in Australia.  It would seem that Australia is finally catching up to the big-box grocery store format.

If you are looking to store bulk grains as part of your preparations, you’ve probably spent some time trying to locate suitable plastic food grade storage containers.

Whilst many online sites mention the 5 gallon buckets (or pails) for food storage containers, the closest size found in Australia would be the 20 litre bucket.

One such supplier of these buckets is The NCI Packaging Shop, this site sells a moderate range of plastic storage buckets up to 20 litre, along with a host of other plastic and even metal containers.  At the time of this post the 20 litre bucket are $5.87 AUD (lid costs $1.40 AUD).  Smaller versions of the same are the 15 litre bucket $5.65 AUD (lid costs $1.32 AUD), or the 10 litre bucket $4.15 (lid costs $1.22 AUD).

One factor to keep an eye on when ordering from this site though is the freight costs.  To Sydney it costs $12.00 AUD for orders under $50 AUD, where-as it jumps to $37.00 AUD for orders up to $250 AUD.  So to keep overheads down you might wish to stick to ordering below $50 per order until you intend to spend over $150 – at least for those of you from states other than NT, QLD or VIC.  The point is that you might have to fiddle around with the number of orders to keep the freight costs down.

I’m not sure how airtight these containers are, so to be safe you might consider pre-packaging your grains into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers and then storing these bags in the plastic buckets.  This way the buckets keep out the bugs and provide a durable storage container whilst the mylar bags keep out the air and moisture.