Jul 05 2008
Costco Emergency Food Kit - What is it?
Today there was some buzz on a “Costco Emergency Food Kit” that has 275 servings on Reddit.com .
The title implied that “now” they just started selling this kit but it has been around for at least a year. It was $100 a year ago and Costco is selling it for $80 now.
The questions I have is
What is it?
How many days food does it represent?
It says it will store for 20 years and that water needs to be added. It sounds like it is freeze dried food but why don’t they say that? There is very little information on Costco’s website. Looking at the label I found the brand’s website here;
On this website it still does not indicate what it is. However it does tell you the nutritional information including salt content which is very high in one meal (Cacciatore), 25% of the RDA for each “serving” (one cup after water is added). One other piece of information is that cooking instructions which appear to indicate one cup of water per serving needs to be boiled and then content added when it is simmered for 20 minutes.
This does not sound like freeze dried food, but then what is it?
I found these comments on post of the blog “1913Intel” from July 11th 2007;
…tried the Ala King and Western Stew mixes. We really hated the Ala King mix, but we only hated the Western Stew mix. They’re too salty, and generally don’t taste that good. Although the Western Stew was a lot better than the Ala King. I wouldn’t want to live on this stuff for very long.
We didn’t try out the other mixes because we’re returning the remaining bucket to Costco.
There were other comments in forums indicating people thought it was better than ramen noodles, and cheap, a good deal if you are a student on a budget and love salt.
There is no calorie information to indicate how many servings you need per day on the Costco site, but there is information on the nutrition information labels shown Food for Health website. The Cacciatore, Ala King, stew and pancake servings have 200 to 220 calories each. The soup, noodles, and chowder servings have 98 to 125 calories per serving. The whey milk has 80 calories per serving.
A healthy adult’s typical calorie intake is 2000 to 2500 calories per day. You can get away with less if you are less active but if you have too low calorie intake for an extended period of time and you may suffer health issues as a result.
So based on the calorie information above a typical day’s diet would be;
Pancakes X 2 - 420 calories
Milk 2 glasses - 160 calories
Cacciatore Lunch X 3 - 618 calories
Ala King Dinner X 4 - 880 calories
This works out to 11 servings a day for a total of 2078 calories per day.
The 275 serving emergency food kit will support an individual adult for about 25 days, which is a little more than 3 weeks.
So for $80 you can eat salty food for 3 weeks. You need to boil water to prepare each meal and wait 20 minutes for it to be ready.
What would happen if in a disaster, you are unable to boil water all the time, how would you prepare it?
Published under Emergency Food, Survival Food, Survival Food Preparedness in the News
Thank you so much for doing this research. You answered all the questions that were brimming from my skepticism when a friend mentioned this “Food for Health” emergency food supply that she found at Costco. When she said it was a 3 month supply of food for one adult for only $85, it sounded potentially interesting (it’s soooo cheap compared to freeze dried food), but I was very skeptical, b/c cost aside, I simply couldn’t imagine that everything a grown adult would need for NINETY days could fit in a single bucket. So after a google search, I found your article, and indeed it was too good to be true.
Cheap as it is (and compact), it’s definitely not something I want to invest in. Given that it is the equivalent of only 3 weeks of food (rather than the 3 months that the elusive “serving” labeling would like you to conclude), tastes nasty, is chocked full of salt and hydrogentated oils, and requires 20 minutes of simmering, this gets a thumbs down from me. Since I’d never use this on a daily basis, any rotation option is out of the question, and I’d hate to have to survive on such yucky food. I’ll stick with the freeze dried products by Mountain House that Daily Bread is selling–pricey, but quite tasty, and with a little negotiating, you really can get a decent deal.
I agree with the 1913 Blog. This stuff was NASTY. In the review I just posted on Costco, I said I would have to be both poor and starving to eat this food. Better than Ramen noodles? I don’t think so!
This would be the perfect supplement for the Zombie Apocalypse.