Over the years, we have reviewed many commercial meals for the outdoors, often finding new brands to share, but also brands that have been around for 10, 20, or even 40 years.
This version of the TrailCooking blog has 19 pages of commercial meal reviews. When the site was hacked in 2018, I decided not to worry about all the reviews long before then; they were out of date. Some companies had gone under, and others had changed the meals entirely by then.
So, I started over and got to work. If I saw a new brand, I’d pick up a few meals to try out. I also picked up some old-school brands and reviewed them for comparison.
My Gold Standard for reviewing is our boys. With 3 of them, I always ask them for help in reviewing. They are adventurous eaters. They are blunt and honest if they hate something. Or if I notice they are hogging a meal, it’s a winner.
Let’s talk about the history of commercial meals, though. Before the space race, your options for camp food were pretty basic. Only thanks to NASA doing so much with freeze-drying do we have what we have now. It’s like how we have GPS, thanks to the military. Commercial meals became a thing because boomers loved hiking and backpacking in the 60s to 90s. It pushed through a lot of creation in that period of gear and food for the outdoors. And it meant lightweight food that lasted a long time.
But for a long time, there wasn’t any competition in the market—just a couple of brands with very basic foods to choose from: Mountain House, Alpine Aire, Backpacker’s Pantry, and such.
When I first started backpacking in the early 2000s (I first backpacked in college in the 90s, but we cooked like it was 1892 over a fire), the choices were limited.
I got lucky initially, buying the meals out of a Campmor catalog or at REI in Seattle. I ate simple meals for the first couple of years, such as roasted turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy—salty, bland, but edible. Then I bought one that changed my life completely. It was so bad that I wrote a manifesto about it.
I wouldn’t pick up a commercial meal for nearly five years. It was that bad.
Eventually, as I started writing the blog, I decided to review the food I found, then meals. By the end of the 2000s, new companies were entering the fray every year.
My goal was to help my readers avoid a meal so bad that they chose to go hungry, more than singing praises for the best meals. I prefer none of you ever have that moment where your throat says it’s not happening.
In the past six years, I have found a few that are so gross that I want to climb to the top of a mountain and scream, “DO NOT BUY THIS!”
Thankfully, with more modern meals, that happens far less these days. I try to be nice in reviews – find positives to write about. But sometimes, I do tell our readers to run.
Most of the time, the meals are fine. Some are even so good that I would eat them at home. The companies are getting more adventurous every year with flavors and ingredients. Some companies use much less salt (but I am looking at you, Mountain House, and your high sodium levels. It could be cut a third, and no one would notice.).
And here’s the thing: Not everyone has the time or bandwidth to make their own meals. Sometimes, it’s just nice to grab a couple of packages and be done—ready to hit the trail or have “just in case” on hand. It’s good to know not what to waste money on.
Brands We Have Reviewed:
(In no particular order)
That leads to a real question for our readers:
Are there brands you have seen ads for (especially on social media) that you wondered how they tasted? Were they really good? Or were they not worth dumping $10 to 25 a meal on? Let us know if there is a brand you have seen that we haven’t reviewed. I am always on the lookout for new meals to review. We have a number of meals coming soon and will be starting reviewing them for late summer and fall trips.
And I know how much you all love the awful AI images I dream up…..
~Sarah