Wise Company Long Term Emergency Freeze-Dried Food Supply, Breakfast and Entree Variety

Was 2 weeks late... after already waiting 2 weeks...finaly got it and is 50% just granola 25% soup . Last 25% is brake up of only 6 diners ... 1 those diners is soup again.... there are 3 buckets of granola, and two flavors .... I dont know if it was cheap out and not add strawberries or so you could just lie to your self and make you think you have a choice in food.

After opening all nine Tubs, about HALF was "Crunchy Granola" and "Breakfast Cereal". We could live on it but this wasn't cheap and I was expecting a little more diversity. I guess Wise was thinking we'd eat a breakfast for half of our meals. I would try a different brand were I to purchase again. I will be buying some more dinner meals but not from Wise. Fool me once ...

My son and I researched a lot before purchasing Wise Company food storage. For the quality and amount of food you are getting the price can't be beat. I hope to never have to use these but they give me great peace of mind adding them to my family's emergency preparedness kit. I have sampled the pastas and potatoes before at a outdoorsman type store and thought they were surprising really good. They were something I could live on without dreading mealtime if I had too. Although I suppose that during an end of world event I would get to the point where any food would be acceptable. An other brand I have tried was hard to gag down and left an after taste that wouldn't go away.Wiseman products are well preserved and packed in foil packets and then sealed in airtight/waterproof buckets. So even if something happens to the buckets the packets should still be okay.I live along a fault line on Alaska and had put off getting serious about having an emergency stash once I moved off the islands. On an Alaskan island food storage is essential but now having ready access to Walmart and Costco I got lazy. I finally purchased these buckets after thinking about it for months cause it is a serious investment. I ordered them on a Saturday, January 23, 2016. I kid you not, super early Sunday morning we had a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. Most stores lost their milk stock and anything in glass jars. We couldn't drink our well water for over a week. I'm not saying we were destitute and desperate but it was a wake up call for sure.The emergency preparedness teams up here tell us that after a major natural disaster we could be on our own for up to 2 weeks because of our location to the rest of the country and that non-perishable food rations are essential.I have since also purchased Wise Company's buckets of dried fruit. Having these food buckets in with the rest of our emergency stash gives me great peace of mind knowing that if it gets down to it at least food is one less thing I and my family will have to worry about. When it comes to that point you will be glad you took the time and spent the money on these.

Most people would probably think a "serving," when it comes to emergency food, is a meal. Well, plan to starve. Some of the servings are 50 calories of pudding. Bottom line: a bucket says it will last an adult a week. If SHTF, it will be nice to have something other than a bag of rice, but the cost of feeding a family on these for any length of time would be quite high. As a supplement to squirrel and the neighbor's cat, I guess you could do worse, though, and 25 year shelf life is reassuring (though I'm not sure it will have to last that long).

Arrived yesterday, opened to check contents and found one package not sealed (evident because there was fine powder inside the bucket). So we tried that meal last night and it tasted fine. The rest is tucked away for a ‘rainy day’...or whatever.

Shady company

After researching a number of vendors, we decided to purchase this product as one aspect of our emergency food supply. Here are some of the factors we considered, and how this product compared:TASTE: We bought a few of the Wise freeze-dried meals and tried them, and we found that they're not bad tasting... not like a home-cooked meal, but not bad. We figured if we had to live off them for a month, there's enough variety and they taste good enough that we wouldn't find it difficult to endure. (See my review of Mountain House food for a comparison.)SHELF LIFE: The meals come in individual packets, which are in turn sealed in plastic tubs. This gives them an advertised shelf life of 25 years. Since we're not regular hikers or campers who will use the food up on a routine basis, we wanted it to last a long time between replacement. This certainly meets that criterion!WEIGHT: We wanted to be able to take our food with us in case we had to leave on foot. These tubs are compact enough that their contents could be easily be distributed in a standard ruck sack or backpack.The biggest down side to this product is the low calorie count per meal. So if you're doing anything other than sitting around waiting for help, plan on the food being consumed at about twice the rate you'd expect (i.e., two servings per actual meal). Each serving is about 200-250 calories (it varies depending on what the entree is), so the 240-serving package will last one person about 30-40 days at 1500 calories per day. Since, on average, men require 2500 calories per day and women require 2000 per day, you can see that you'll be losing weight or using the food up even faster. So plan accordingly based on calorie count, rather than number of servings.

I tested two of the courses and they were satisfactory, but the pasta always seemed to be undone. I will make sure to have the water boiling and let stand for extra minutes. Taste isn't bad for the subject matter, but we're talking emergency good not dining out. All in all I would recommend Wise foods.