Emergency food: tins, bars, rations or freeze-dried

Four ways to keep three days of food

Every list for a 72-hour reserve has a line that just says food. The UK’s Be Ready asks for food that keeps without a fridge or cooking;³ Spain’s 2025 family guide names tins and jars, energy bars, biscuits and nuts.² Wherever you shop, that leaves four kinds to choose from:

• Tins and jars from the supermarket: stews, cooked pulses in a jar, fish in oil, fruit in syrup.
• Pressed bars, sold as emergency rations: dense biscuit bars eaten as they are.
• Wet rations, the military-style bag of ready-cooked food with a flameless heater.
• Freeze-dried meals: cooked dishes with the water taken out, which go back to a meal with water.

The criteria work anywhere: cost per day, weight, water and heat, and the date on the label. The prices are Spain’s. We compared one product of each kind, each on sale in a Spanish online shop, on the price of a 2,000 kcal day. That figure is the reference intake for an average adult in EU labelling law,¹ a yardstick and not a ration rule. The cost of a day is the price divided by the kcal on the page’s nutrition table, times 2,000; the tins are a three-day basket of eleven lines from Eroski’s online shop, and the other three examples come from liofilizado.es, a specialist shop. Prices are those shown on the date under the sources.

The table: cost, weight, water and shelf life

Tins are the cheapest calories and the heaviest. Pressed bars come close on price and weigh less than a third as much. The wet ration costs about twice as much as either, and freeze-dried meals cost the most per day, ours included. The other products we priced blur the middle of that order: per 1,000 kcal, a second bar comes to €7.78 and a larger ration pack to €6.08, against €5.01 and €9.73 for the two in the table. Two more freeze-dried meals, at €19.98 and €21.38, stay at the top.⁶¹¹⁹¹⁰

Water is the hidden line

Tins bring their own water, which is why the basket weighs what it does. Bars bring none and you drink beside them. Freeze-dried food needs its water added, and that water comes out of the same bottles you drink from.

That changes the shopping. A household that picks freeze-dried food buys more water with it, and keeps it where the food is.

Shelf life, as the makers state it

NRG-5 bars: 20 years, best before 2046.⁵ CONVAR-7 biscuits: 10 years.⁶ The 24-hour wet ration: “1 año” from manufacture on one line and a best-before of 30 August 2028 on another.⁷ The freeze-dried meals: 4, 6 and “up to 8” years.⁸⁹¹⁰ The supermarket pages give no date at all, so read it on the tin.

Ours carry months where those carry years: at least 12 months, counted from the day each pouch is sealed. For a reserve you eat and replace, that’s enough. Spain’s guide asks for the kit to be checked every six months, dates included,² and Germany’s civil protection office calls it a living reserve: use the food in everyday cooking and replace what’s gone.¹² A date decades away matters most for a box nobody opens, and what decides such a date is in long-term food storage. How the date works on our pouches, and what happens once one is open, is in how long freeze-dried food keeps.

Which suits which household

A family in a flat with a gas hob. Tins and jars, from the non-perishable food list, with a manual tin opener. They’re the cheapest day and food the household already eats. Keep a bag of bars as well, for the night the hob is no use.

One person, little space, or a reserve in the car. Pressed bars: a day weighs 435 g and needs no water and no heat. Plan the drinking water separately, and expect to eat the same thing three days running.

Someone who’d rather eat proper meals and will rotate them. Freeze-dried, with the extra water stored beside it. Wet rations sit between the two: no water for the food and a heater in the bag, at a heavier weight and about twice the cost of tins. What armies put in theirs is in MRE and military rations.

Worked out for two adults and three days, tins cost about €59 and weigh about 9.4 kg; bars cost about €60 and weigh 2.6 kg. Two of our boxes take twice 3.1 l of water to make up, on top of the 9 litres the two of you drink. For two weeks or a month the same sum scales up in how much emergency food per person, and the whole three-day kit, priced line by line, is in what a 72-hour kit costs in Spain.

Where our box fits

The 72-Hour Food Reserve is freeze-dried: a porridge and two Large mains a day, cooked first and then freeze-dried whole. One of the mains, Lentil & Vegetable Stew, is vegan.

Four pouches from the 72-hour box: weight, water, shelf life and energy

Pouch	Net weight	Water	Keeps for	Energy
Chicken & RiceLarge	200 g	370 ml	at least 12 months	834 kcal
Beef Goulash with PotatoesLarge	200 g	430 ml	at least 12 months	843 kcal
Lentil & Vegetable StewLarge	200 g	490 ml	at least 12 months	731 kcal
Porridge & Fruit	90 g	250 ml	at least 12 months	341 kcal

Four pouches from the 72-hour box: weight, water, shelf life and energy

• Chicken & RiceLarge

  Net weight

  200 g

  Water

  370 ml

  Keeps for

  at least 12 months

  Energy

  834 kcal

• Beef Goulash with PotatoesLarge

  Net weight

  200 g

  Water

  430 ml

  Keeps for

  at least 12 months

  Energy

  843 kcal

• Lentil & Vegetable StewLarge

  Net weight

  200 g

  Water

  490 ml

  Keeps for

  at least 12 months

  Energy

  731 kcal

• Porridge & Fruit

  Net weight

  90 g

  Water

  250 ml

  Keeps for

  at least 12 months

  Energy

  341 kcal

The pouches in the box can also be made with cold water, 20–30 minutes depending on the meal, so the menu works with the hob off. Chicken & Rice takes about 20 minutes that way. Made cold, meat and potato stay a little firmer and a little liquid may be left; stir it in. Not everything we make does this: a broth such as Puchero Broth is hot water only, so it belongs to the days the hob works. For a single day in a bag rather than three in a cupboard, a 24-hour ration from the supermarket builds one from the shelf, and the 72-hour kit list has everything else that goes beside the food.

From our range

72-Hour Food Reserve

Breakfast and two mains a day, 3 days of them, and 1,976 kcal a day.

€112.90Hear from us before the shop opensSee the box