mealsrationsPublished October 28, 2026
How Stock Up makes its freeze-dried meals
Five steps from a cooked dish to a sealed pouch, the release rule every batch has to pass and the record behind each lot number.
Every pouch of Stock Up freeze-dried meals is cooked in San Luis de Sabinillas, on the Costa del Sol, and each batch spends 24 to 36 hours under vacuum before it's ready to pack. The first recipe made this way is Meal No. 01 Chicken & Rice: chicken at 41 % of the recipe, with rice, peas, carrot, sweetcorn, olive oil, salt and spices. What follows is how it gets from a cooked dish into a sealed 110 g pouch, and what every batch has to pass on the way.
Where it's made
Stock Up produces in San Luis de Sabinillas, in the municipality of Manilva (Málaga), between Estepona and Gibraltar. Every recipe is made in batches, and each batch is weighed, measured and written up before any of it goes into a pouch.
Five steps, with the figure for each
| Step | What happens | The figure |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Cook | The recipe is cooked as a whole dish | 4 recipes |
| 2. Freeze | Cooked food spread in a thin layer, frozen solid | Below −30 °C |
| 3. Dry | Ice turns to vapour under vacuum | 24 to 36 hours |
| 4. Measure | A sample of the batch is tested | aw 0.60 or lower to pass |
| 5. Pack | Zip pouch, oxygen absorber, heat seal, lot and date | 36 months best-before |
Sweets skip the first step. They arrive ready-made, go straight to the freezing stage and need only a few hours under vacuum, which is why their bag says "Made in Sabinillas" and the Meals and Rations pouches say "Cooked in Sabinillas".
Cooking comes first
Freeze-drying preserves a cooked dish; it doesn't cook one. So the dish has to be right before freezing starts. The chicken and rice is cooked as a whole recipe, with the vegetables in it, and the same goes for the beef chili, the bolognese and the lentils with chorizo. The porridge for the Rations range, oats with apple, banana and strawberry, is cooked too.
Once cooked, the food is spread in a thin, even layer, because an even layer dries evenly. Nothing goes into the food between cooking and the pouch, so the ingredient list on the back is the recipe itself. Then the freezing starts. Everything below −30 °C is ice, including the water inside each grain of rice.
A vacuum then lowers the pressure far enough that the ice turns straight to vapour. A little heat keeps that going. A batch of cooked meals takes 24 to 36 hours, depending on the recipe and the size of the batch. The comparison with drying in warm air is set out in freeze-dried vs dehydrated food.
The gate before the pouch
A batch that has finished drying isn't packed yet. A sample is taken and its water activity is read: the share of water still free to support microbial growth, on a scale from 0 to 1. The release rule is one line long. A batch is packed only when it measures 0.60 or below.
A batch that reads higher goes back for more drying or isn't sold.
Then it goes into metallised zip pouches, each with an oxygen absorber, and the pouches are heat-sealed. Every seal is checked. The lot number and best-before date are printed on the base: 36 months for Meals and Rations, 12 for Sweets.
The record behind the lot number
EU Regulation 178/2002, article 18, requires every food business to know where each batch came from and where it went. Our batch record holds, for each lot, the cooking date, the core temperature at the end of cooking, the measured water activity, the seal check and the best-before date.
So the lot number on the base of a pouch is a key. Give us that number and we can say which day it was cooked, what its water activity read and which other pouches came from the same batch. On the home page, the batch on sale is shown with its own figures.
One recipe, two sizes
The range is four savoury recipes, one porridge and six sweets, each numbered on the pouch. The four savoury recipes come in two sizes: the 110 g Meals pouch for the desk and the 120 g Rations pouch for the hill. So Rations No. 01 Chicken & Rice is the same dish as Meal No. 01, with 469 kcal and 45 g of protein.
What's on every pouch
The front carries the kcal, the protein and the grams. The back carries the full ingredient list with allergens in bold, the nutrition table per 100 g and per pouch, and the preparation: 300 ml of water for a Meal, at 80–100 °C for 8 minutes or cold for about 20. The base carries the lot and the date. The legal name on the back spells out the method, too: freeze-dried ready meal of chicken with rice and vegetables.
For anyone who'd rather buy a box than a pouch, the 72 h Pack at €85 holds three days of food for one person, and the four recipes in 110 g pouches are on the Meals page. The five steps and the standard behind them are also on the About page.
