Backpacking meal planner and food calculator
Plan the food for your trip
- Backpackers
- 1 hiker
- Trip length
- 5 days
- Daily calories
- 5,050 kcal/day
- Cooking
- Boil water
1. Expedition basics
What you bring decides which recipes the planner can use. Right now: boil water, 139 of 141 meals match.
2. Preferences & limits
A target, not a hard cap.
Share of daily calories from snacks rather than meals.
Share of meals that come out of a commercial pouch.
Planning food for a backpacking trip
Packing food for a backpacking trip means solving four problems at once: enough calories to keep hiking, little enough weight that carrying it is not the problem, a price you are willing to pay, and meals you will still want to eat on day five. BackpackMeals does that arithmetic and hands back a day-by-day menu.
There is no account, and the plan is built in your browser rather than on a server, so what you type stays on your machine. Anonymous usage figures, covering which tools get used and how far people get through them, are collected so this can be improved. Describe the trip above and the plan is built from a catalog of 222 foods and 141 meal recipes. When you are happy with it, Copy link encodes the trip settings in a URL that rebuilds the same plan for anyone you send it to.
What goes into a backpacking food plan
Food planning usually goes wrong in one of two directions. Count only calories and you end up with a stuff sack of bars and oil packets that hits the number and that nobody wants to open. Plan only meals and the weight creeps up unnoticed until the pack is on your back. A usable plan holds both at once, which means settling four things: your daily calorie target, how many times a day you stop to eat, how much of the day comes from snacks, and what you can actually cook with the gear you are carrying.
How the planner builds a menu
BackpackMeals is meal-first. It picks complete recipes your cooking setup can handle, then scales ingredients within those recipes, so what comes out still looks like food rather than a pile of components chosen to reach a number.
- Your gear decides the recipe pool. Six toggles resolve to one of four cooking profiles, and 70 of the 141 recipes need no heat at all, so a stoveless trip still gets real meals.
- Each day is split across meal slots, with the rest of the target coming from snacks. Recipes grow or shrink a little, never more than a quarter down or a half up, so a serving stays a serving.
- It tells you when it could not do what you asked. If a share you set comes out more than ten points away, the results say so and name the reason.
Guides, tools and data
The planner is the quickest route to a finished menu. These pages cover the parts of it in more detail.
- Backpacking meals guideCalories, weight, lightweight options and example menus.
- Backpacking meal plannerThe same planner, with the reasoning behind each setting.
- Backpacking calorie calculatorEstimate a daily target from your body, mileage and terrain.
- Backpacking recipes with calorie countsAll 141 recipes with calories per serving, calories per ounce and protein.
- Backpacking food listAll 222 foods, sortable by calories per ounce.
Common questions
How much food should I carry per day?
Most backpackers land between 1.5 and 2.5 pounds of food per person per day, but that figure is a result rather than a target. It falls out of your calorie target divided by how densely you pack those calories. BackpackMeals works it from that direction: it sets a weight target from your calorie target at roughly 110 calories per ounce, or 125 if you choose the Lightest priority, then reports what the finished plan actually weighs.
Do I need a stove?
No. Seventy of the 141 recipes need no heat, so a cold-soak or no-cook trip still produces a full menu. Turning the stove off narrows the pool rather than emptying it, and the trip details step shows how many recipes still match as you change the gear toggles.
Is my plan saved anywhere?
Not on a server. There is no account, and the plan itself never leaves your machine: it lives in the browser tab until you reload it. Your gear choices, any foods you add yourself, and ticked-off shopping items are kept in your browser's own storage, so those do survive a reload. Anonymous usage figures are collected to show which parts of the site get used, but they are counts and settings only, never food names or anything else you type. Copy link encodes the trip settings rather than the food, so the link rebuilds the same plan deterministically wherever it is opened.