Planning Your Adventure Food Pack

Plan the perfect adventure food pack! Learn how to balance freshness, weight, and nutrition for a 6-day trip, fueling your journey with tasty, energy-packed meals.

When preparing for a multi-day adventure, it is important to have a nutritious and delicious food pack. Depending on the duration of your trip you can take so much with you. So you have to decide, which method is right for you, the dried stuff, the adventure food, fresh meals, etc. They all come with their own pros and cons. In this article we'll dive into our process of creating the Foodpack for the Origin Trip.

So where did we start? Our requirements were simple, fresh, tasty, and lightweight. Even though these requirements are simple, realizing a food pack from them is kind of a challenge. It became the fine art of balancing fresh with functionality.

Trip Duration

Food only stays fresh for so long, so the duration of the trip is essential to take in mind when creating your food pack. For The Origin Trip we had to account for 6 days of adventure, without the option to re-supply, this meant that we had to pack for 6 whole days. Fresh meals can only get you so far, within roughly 3-4 days most of the fresh stuff will go bad, so dried food is a great solution, it's nutritious, but I wouldn't exactly wanna eat that for the whole trip. For our Foodpack we wanted to have as much fresh meals as possible.

What About Weight?

When planning your meals you also have to account for the weight. Generally speaking fresh meals tend to be heavier than the dried alternatives. At the start of your adventure you're fresh, hint hint, eating the fresh and heavier things first is a great way to compensate for the extra weight you have to carry in order to have fresh meals. That's why we started out with the fresh meals and later in the trip added some more things that stay good for longer, for example a few dried meals or noodles. Hey makes sense but we think it is still worth mentioning. The lighter your backpack the more you can enjoy the trip, never compromising on snacks though.

Nutritious and Delicious

Now that we've explained the freshness part of creating a food pack we can continue with "what kind of meals" should you include in your food pack. Like mentioned before we need meals for a 6 day adventure, as we are offering our Foodpack as an add-on. We want our adventurers to have 2 options for every meal.

If we're talking weight, a good baseline to make sure you're not carrying way to much weight and too little calories, we recommend a 3-to-1 ratio. This means, on average, 300 kcal for every 100 grams of food you bring. How serious you want to follow this ratio depends on how long your trip is, the re-supply options you have, and how active you're going to be on your trip.

For the fresh meals this 3-to-1 ratio is sometimes a challenge. When you're out and about you don't have all the pots and pans you might have at home so we also need to account for that when coming up with our meals.

We found two great and versatile ingredients which are tortilla's/wraps and couscous. These meet the 3-to-1 criteria and allow you to add all kinds of things. You can add some veggies and some protein to the couscous and you have a meal, same for the tortilla's, these can be breakfast, lunch, even dinner.

As you might expect veggies are not going to make the 3-to-1 criteria, you can easily make up for this with your snacks; a bag of chips, some chocolate or something else you might want to snack.

Fueling Your Adventure

Packing food for an adventure is all about balance; freshness, weight, nutrition, and, most importantly, taste. By strategically planning your meals, starting with fresh ingredients and transitioning to lighter, long-lasting options, you can enjoy delicious and nutritious food without being weighed down. Whether it's a hearty couscous dish, a versatile tortilla wrap, or a well-earned chocolate snack, the right food pack keeps you fueled. After all, great adventures deserve great meals!