Adventure Meals by RightOnTrek Review
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For me, planning meals for a trip feels like drudgery. I’ve often wished I could just farm out the work and end up with a wide variety of good and easy-to-make food. I lucked out when asked to do a RightOnTrek review. Adventure Meals by RightOnTrek does exactly what I was looking for. Via their website, you can quickly get a custom meal plan for your next trip.
How does RightOnTrek Work?
RightOnTrek’s website feels easy to use. Once you get into the meal planning page, it presents a number of options for you to pick from. The first choice you have to make is the number of days and the number of people. If you pick more than one person, you enter the other person’s name, and then you click “Start My Plan.” For my RightOnTrek review, RightOnTrek gave me enough credits for one person, 2,400 calories and two days.
After the initial setup, you get to select each person’s food preferences from a number of different options. I picked spicy and then my favorite options for hot beverages and and sauces. After making your selection, you click “See My Plan.”
The next step is pretty cool. You see a bunch of food divided by breakfast, lunch and dinner and snacks. If there’s something you don’t like, you can swap it out for something else. You can also remove it completely should you desire. I didn’t do this for the review, but I’m not a fan of cooking breakfast. I’d rather pour myself a bowl of Grape Nuts and powdered milk and call it good. If you’re like me, you can just remove the breakfast option. For the review, I went with their choices and then cooked it on the trail.
With the breakfast and dinner dehydrated meals, you can click on each individual item to see customization options. For example, with the potato dish I got I could pick to add a condiment and a couple of extra add-ons. If I wanted, I could have increased the size of the serving as well.
When you buy for more than one person, you can switch between the people using buttons on the left of the menu. The downside that I found is that the dinners and breakfasts are often different between the two people. When trying to save weight, you want to be able to carry one pan and cook everyone’s dinner at the same time. Ideally, there should be a way to link all the people in your group’s dinners and breakfasts together so each person gets the same stuff each day. This would make joint cooking easier. You can manually do this, but it does take extra work.
I know many people buy their own food and then haul their own stove even when camping with friends, so this won’t be an issue for you if you do that. But, if you cook as a family just be ready to swap out a few breakfasts and dinners. Luckily, the website makes it easy to do that.
Overall, it’s a slick way to plan food for a trip. I found myself just trying the “Surprise Me” button over and over to see what I got.
After you check out, the food comes to your house organized by day. You just throw the bags into your bear bag and head out. You don’t need to do anything to get it ready to go. Simple, fast and slick.
How’s the RightOnTrek food?
The food is great! It provided a good mix between dehydrated breakfasts and dinners and quick and easy snacks and lunches. A good chunk of the midday food is meal replacement bars, fruit bars and treats. I really liked the RipVan waffles. I’ve never had those before. If anything, the mix I got tended to be sweeter than I would have bought. But, you can change out anything that you don’t like.
As far as their brand of dehydrated meals, I had oatmeal, an egg dish, vegan shepherds pie and a beef lasagna stew. All tasted good. The egg dish was a little strange though. I used the recommended amount of water and the eggs cooked up fine. They were nice and fluffy, but there was left over flavored water below the eggs. The dish still tasted good and had the right texture other than the extra water. The only downside was that it required cooking instead of just boiling water and adding it to a bag. That said, I think the cooking part added to the better flavor that these dishes had vs. similar freeze dried meals or meals that you just add water to and wait 10 minutes.
I do have one item of warning. Skip the Black Instant Vietnamese Coffee. That was terrible. Get the Nescafe Coffee 3-in-1 or a tea. I’m not a big fan of making hot water in the morning, so I personally would skip it all and just carry MiO Energy Mix. If you have to have your coffee, get the Nescafe instead. I’ve had it before, and it’s okay.
Other than the coffee, I liked all the other choices that I got. It was more than filling for me. In fact, I think I’d drop down to the 2,000 to 2,200 calories a day options because I just don’t eat that much.
Is it Cost Effective?
The cost formula is easy. It costs a penny a calorie. If you plan for 2,400 calorie days (estimate your caloric needs), then you are going to pay $24 a day.
To see if this was a cost effective way to buy food, I compared it to the cost of everything I’m buying for a 10-12 day trip that I’m heading out on in two weeks. I bought a lot of similar items in bulk before I had an opportunity to do a RightOnTrek review and saved a little money but not much. It was less than 15%. But, and I think this is a big “but,” I don’t have the variety of items that you can get by going with RightOnTrek. You can certainly spend less than this with careful planning, but it is in the ballpark for doing dehydrated or freeze dried meals and the variety of items that gets included.
To see how it compared to other services, I compared it to a local Boundary Waters outfitter that provides a food outfitting service. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, because the local outfitter packs everything in reusable containers to reduce waste. They include cleaning supplies, toilet paper, bear bagging supplies and other items. Then they pack it all inside a portage pack. It’s a higher level of service and the higher price of $42 to $45 per day reflects that. Plus, you just show up to the BWCAW entry point and it’s all ready for you. You don’t even have to pack it. So, it’s not a direct comparison.
That said, RightOnTrek at $24 a day for 2,400 calories seems well priced to me.
What’s the Verdict of This RightOnTrek Review?
Thumbs up. The website is well done and easy to use. You get a good variety of food at a good price. It’s easy to change out anything you don’t like. The price seems in the ballpark for what you get. I’m really happy with the meal plan I got and liked their branded dehydrated food.
The question for me is, will I actually use their service again when I’m paying with my own money instead of using a credit that they gave me? I think I will. It’s just so easy to use. The price is right. They carry the types of food that I’m likely to eat on a trip. I’m especially going to do this on solo trips. While writing the RightOnTrek review, I priced out three-day, 2000-calorie plan, and at $20 a day, it hits a sweet spot for me. It’s the right amount of food that I know I will eat. It’s a great price for everything that was in the plan. It makes me want to plan a three-day trip just so I can try their service again.
You should check it out and give it a go. Check it out at their website. I’m happy to have had the opportunity to do this review.
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