Trail food, judged on the numbers.
FoodEverest is a small data lab for freeze-dried, dehydrated and prep food. We keep a structured database of 284 meals from 14 brands and compare them on the figures that decide a trip - calories, weight, protein and price - instead of on whichever brand paid for a placement.
R. Berk
Hiker, camper, and founder of FoodEverest
I hike, camp, and spend a good chunk of my life on the trail, usually with my border collie along for the miles. Nature, travel and camping are what I look forward to most in life. The food was the part I got tired of leaving to luck.
So this site is me doing something about that: a database of trail meals compared on the numbers, not guesswork. The longer version, dinner and all, is just below.
Why this site exists
It started with one bad dinner. After a long day out I opened a freeze-dried pouch I had paid a not-small amount for, and it was awful - the kind of bad where the wasted money stings more than the empty stomach.
After that dinner, I started keeping my own list: which meals I would buy again, which ones I would not, and what I had paid for each. For a while that list was the whole system, and for one person it worked fine.
Then I got curious about the things a personal list cannot tell you: how many calories a pouch really carries for its net weight, how much protein comes with it, and what it costs once you divide the price by the calories you get. Those questions need every brand's numbers side by side, not one hiker's memory, so I started collecting them properly, straight from each brand's own published nutrition data. That collecting became FoodEverest: the numbers where a memory used to be.
How we work
- Facts, not borrowed prose. Every figure comes from the manufacturer's own published nutrition data. We aggregate the data; we never rewrite anyone's copy.
- Net food weight, never shipping weight. Calorie density uses each brand's stated net weight of food, so the headline number can't be inflated by packaging.
- Prices are dated, and no fake retailer numbers. The price we show is the manufacturer's own list price on the date we recorded it, marked clearly as not live. We never scrape, guess or hard-code a retailer's price or star rating - those come only from an official retailer link, checked the moment you click.
- Missing beats guessed. If a brand doesn't publish a number, we leave it blank rather than estimate it.
- Every technical claim is fact-checked against the source before it goes live. In a category where a wrong shelf-life or calorie figure can matter, that gate is not optional.