MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) - While choking down yet another fairly bland, mass-produced, freeze-dried meal around a campfire on a hiking trip, brothers Ben and John Ritner asked themselves a simple question.
“What if this were better?”
An idea and a plan of action was hatched.
John Ritner attended culinary school and worked in a commercial kitchen at the Good Food Store, and Ben is a University of Montana grad who focused on web development and business. Both love hiking and the outdoors, and both prefer great-tasting food to the alternative.
Together, they embarked on a long logistical process and have now launched their passion project, called Pinnacle Foods. They make high-protein, freeze-dried, lightweight meals and put them into sustainable packaging for backpackers, hunters and anyone else who needs a shelf-stable, packable meal with a high calorie content.
In a Missoula commercial kitchen, John has come up with his own special recipes; like jalapeno cheddar biscuits and herbed-sausage gravy, sticky-teriyaki chicken with garlic asparagus and coconut rice, scrambled eggs and uncured applewood ham, chipotle beef burrito bowl and herb-roasted chicken and white cheddar dumplings. They’ve even got a wheat-free vegan option, which is Thai peanut curry with roasted vegetables and rice noodles. It’s got bell peppers, broccoli, onions, sweet potatoes, edamame and garlic combined with the coconut-curry peanut sauce and cilantro, sesame, lime and scallions.
John said their bags have twice as much protein as the mass-produced brands like Mountain House, and Pinnacle doesn’t use any additives or preservatives.
“You read the ingredients on other brands and it’s like ‘oh man, I don’t know what most of this is’,” John told the Missoulian. “And the number one ingredients are these starchy fillers. But for our entrees that have meat in it, the number one ingredient is ground beef. So we don’t fill it with a bunch of stuff just to fill the bag up. We think about all the ingredients and what is going to make us feel good after a long day hiking or whatever we’re doing.”
In fact, their 122-gram sticky-teriyaki chicken bag contains 40 grams of protein. A Mountain House 118-gram chicken teriyaki does cost about $1.50 less, but contains only 23 grams of protein.
The Ritner brothers bought four large commercial freeze-dryers, and each 12- to 16-ounce serving of food that goes in will come out as between 3.5 and 4.5 ounces. Ben Ritner said freeze-drying retains much more of the nutrients than at-home dehydrating while allowing the meals to be shelf-stable for many years. They even have a lab test their food to make sure the “water activity level” is much safer than even government standards. Their bags are made from paper and corn byproduct that can be burned without leaving residue unlike the Mylar bags on name-brand backpacking meals.
“You can pour boiling water straight into the bag, so you don’t need bowls or cups,” Ben explained. “It takes about 10 minutes to reconstitute.”
Ben said with some freeze-dried meals, you have to poke around to find the two or three pieces of meat. The goal for their meals is to leave customers feeling like they didn’t get ripped off while they’re shivering under a tarp somewhere in the woods after a long day on the trail.
When coming up with their plan for the business, the brothers decided that people would be willing to pay a dollar or two extra for backcountry meals made in small batches, using natural, fresh ingredients without fillers. So far, they said they’ve gotten good customer feedback and have sold over 1,500 bags. They only have a retail license and not a wholesale license that would allow them to sell in big-box stores, so they’re only selling online direct to customers right now.
Their only hiccup with online marketing is that there’s a now-defunct company called Pinnacle Foods that had the web domain name pinnaclefoods.com, owned by commercial giant Conagra, so the Ritner brothers settled on Pinnaclefoods.co without the ‘m’ on the end. So far it’s working, but every once in a while they get strange emails from people looking for the other company.
The global pandemic appears to have increased demand for non-perishable foods, according to a survey released in October by three research firms based in New York. They found that 52% of American consumers have stockpiled food or essential goods in anticipation of “social unrest tied to a resurgence of COVID-19 in the coming months and/or the election.”
Mountain Home, one of the largest producers of freeze-dried backpacking meals, says on its website that “due to increased demand” many of the company’s items are sold out.
The Northwest Grocery Association is even having to make statements trying to dissuade people from hoarding because it causes other customers to find bare shelves.
“We are seeing little evidence of the need to stockpile,” Holly Chisa with the Northwest Grocery Association said in a statement to the media. “Our supply chains remain strong…We understand that when case counts increase so does anxiety. We are encouraging customers to purchase only what they need and leave the rest for their neighbors and friends.”
Either way, the Ritner brothers are prepared to try to gain a piece of a rapidly-growing market. Two other freeze-dried meal companies, Sasquatch Fuel and Gastro Gnome, popped up in Bozeman recently.
“Our primary market is backpackers and hunters, but you could eat them on the first chair up the mountain skiing,” Ben Ritner explained. “Or you could eat them at home. Now with the lockdowns, or even senior citizens who don’t want to cook, there’s so many markets I think freeze-dried can get into because it can sit on your counter for five years and you just add boiling water to it and it’s just like it was before it was freeze-dried.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.