Review: Summit to Eat Meals (2024)

High calorie, nutritionally balanced freeze dried meals that actually taste amazing! Ideal for outdoor adventurers who value great ingredients.

Gone are the days of finishing a gruelling day of adventuring with a bland and unsatisfying meal as your ‘reward’. Summit to Eat have put the pleasure back into freeze dried meals and have thrown into the bargain a load of clean ingredients, excellent nutrition, high calorie content and hearty and highly satisfying flavours. They are also mega quick and easy to prepare and happen to be exceptionally lightweight too! Not sure why you would opt for anything else.

Summit to Eat: The stats

Summit to Eat review

When it comes to nutrition when hiking, backpacking, biking and adventuring, quality ingredients and eating ‘proper’ food has always been more important to me than saving a few extra grams in my pack. I want to know what I’m eating, enjoy it and feel satisfied and full once I’m done. So I’ve always been a little reluctant to branch out and use ready made hiking meals.

However, on a recent biking trip in Dartmoor, where the weight and size of my meals were as important as their nutrition, I branched out and gave Summit to Eat meals a go. And I was very pleasantly surprised.

Nutrition

Firstly, the ingredient lists of all the meals I gobbled up were comprehensible! I try to always avoid food with mystery ingredients and I was surprised that all the ingredients were well, things that I recognised!

Secondly, all the stats and info of what you get are clearly displayed on the outside of each pack. There was no risk of me not replenishing my diminished energy supplies from a tough day of off road biking up and down the moors – my main meal followed by a dessert equated to over 1000kcal. Perfect.

Preparation

Thirdly, preparing these meals is so quick and easy. You don’t need to carry any bowls or dishes with you, and you just add hot water! Each pack tells you how much water you need to add so it helps if your water pot has measurements on the side so you don’t boil too much water. But if you do end up boiling more than you need, there are fill lines inside the packs and the instructions tell you which line to fill too. This is really useful and especially good if you’re boiling a load of water for hot drinks or for multiple people.

The packs rip open easily, they stand up well on a solid base, and they also re-seal once you’ve filled them up to keep the heat in and prevent spillages. The fact that they re-seal is also great for packing out any other rubbish or waste that you need to take with you without it messing up the inside of your pack. Plus, the packs can be reused once you get home – clean them out and fill them with your homemade hiking meals and snacks for future trips.

Taste

And finally, they taste great. Like really great! I have to say I wasn’t expecting a great deal of flavour for such clean ingredients, but I would honestly be more than happy eating the veggie chilli and chocolate mousse at home. (Might need to get some in store for those ‘can’t be bothered’ nights!)

What I love the most about Summit to Eat meals

The low weight of the Summit to Eat meals is exceptional considering the great nutrition and high calorie content that they offer. But the fact that they are really delicious too makes them an absolutely winning choice. The meals are full flavoured and also somehow manage to have some good textures in them too.

These are the meals I ate during my Dartmoor cycling trip:

Vegetable Chilli with Rice

Weight: 136g
Calorie content: 698kcal
Taste notes: A thoroughly hearty and full flavoured meal that really filled me up. Great texture (no chewy/crunchy rice) and a wonderfully warming spicy kick. A huge thumbs up.

Salmon and Broccoli Pasta

Weight: 117g
Calorie content: 638kcal
Taste notes: The salmon flavours were really strong and the chunks of salmon, although on the tough side, were actually really tasty. Pasta doesn’t often feel as filling to me as other carbs, so I finished the meal feeling like I could have eaten another good few mouthfuls.

Custard Apple Crunch

Weight: 87g
Calorie content: 447kcal
Taste notes: A yummy custardy treat – hearty and warming. It needs a really good stir to get the crunchy bits mixed in properly (I found much of mine at the bottom!). Not as appley as I’d hoped, but yummy all the same.

Chocolate Mousse with Granola and Cherry

Weight: 97g
Calorie content: 416kcal
Taste notes: OMG! Soooo good. And no hot water needed – just cold. After 10 minutes the chocolatey powder actually turned into a well-set mousse. The chocolate flavours were great, but the crunchy granola really topped off this filling and highly satisfying dessert. A real treat at the end of a tough day.

What I don’t love so much about Summit to Eat meals

The nature of pre-made camping and hiking meals is that there is often excess packaging and waste. Usually more of it than if you prepare meals yourself and package them for more than one person in the same packet etc. None of the meals are available as more than one serving – which would help to save on packaging. Having said that, they are designed with solo adventurers in mind.

Verdict

For wild cycling missions, hiking expeditions and solo adventures, Summit to Eat meals offer exceptional nutritional value and high calorie content without compromising on weight. And the icing on the cake is that they are genuinely really enjoyable to eat; something that you will look forward to and be rewarded with at the end of a hard day on the trail.

There’s also plenty of choice for those with dietary requirements, and the freeze-dried ingredients are as clean as if you’d cooked the meals from scratch at home. Highly satisfying, filling and delicious, and at a competitive price.

Disclaimer: Cool of the Wild received this product free in return for an honest review. We only recommend gear that we love from companies we trust and we are under no obligation to give a positive review. All thoughts and opinions are that of the reviewer and we are in no way influenced by the brand or company.