The great dehy crisis of '23...

 Where have all the Backcountry meals gone?

If you are out tramping, biking, kayaking or doing some other outdoor pursuit you are probably eating Backcountry Cuisine dehydrated meals at least some of the time. You might have noticed that they seem to be a bit scarce in your local outdoor retail stores...there is a reason for this.

Classic Backcountry Cuisine meal...Cooked Breakfast

Back in November 2022 one of the large machines Backcountry Cuisine use to dehydrate ingredients went out of service. This has seriously slowed production rates. As a result there has been a shortage of backcountry meals in most of the local stores. I recently visited the Hunting and Fishing store at Tower Junction here in Christchurch and they had NO Backcountry meals at all. Like zero...not even the Vegan meals most people never buy. 

Dehydrator at Backcountry Cuisine in Invercargill

Hopefully the shortages do not last for too long because love them or hate them Backcountry Cuisine is the number one freeze dried meal brand here. Losing them from the market would be a huge problem for anyone who uses freeze dried meals. You might have to do what the old timers did and eat real foods like sausages, steak and bacon with mashed spud, rice or cous cous.

 My God how primitive!!! 

Is this your future without Backcountry meals?

Real Meals, Radix and boutique food companies are making inroads into the freeze dry meal market but they have neither the range of meals nor the production ability to totally replace Backcountry Cuisine. As yet we cannot get any of the big international brands like Mountain House here. 

Real Meals...not as large as Backcountry cuisine

If you live in Christchurch and need to buy some Backcountry meals you should go have a look at the  Hunting & Fishing store in Rangiora. I was there in the weekend and they had ample supplies of both the small and regular sized meals. They also have plenty of the bags of mixed vegetables, dried meat and mashed potato. 

Small sized BBC meals at Rangiora Hunting & Fishing

 Either they had a stash of meals or they just don't get the volume of traffic that the Christchurch store receives. BTW: the Rangiora Hunting & Fishing has a great range of items in store...it is just about as big as the flagship Tower Junction store. 

They also sell Real Meals, O-Meals and Outdoor gourmet meals

Anyway...hopefully Backcountry Cuisine will soon rectify the problem and be back up to full time production once again.