Description

Real Meals was born, and 100% New Zealand made. It’s widely accepted that NASA made freeze dried food technology famous to feed their astronauts in space, and we won’t argue about that, but the Maori and Polynesians have been drying food for thousands of years long before a rocket scientist got excited about it. Founding owner, Nathan Fa’avae is half Samoan, it’s his ancestors and the Maori people of Aotearoa that made drying food not only a survival tool for epic ocean voyaging, but they made it an art form so that they could enjoy food out of season, or preserve food at one end of the country to be enjoyed at the other. Their drying skills meant they took meat, birds and fruit to sea and over land, which provided them the nutrition and energy to sail and paddle thousands of kilometres throughout the Pacific ocean, and traverse the volcanoes, plains and alps of New Zealand. The Maori took things even further using bull kelp to craft air tight bags to store their dried food in. How incredible is that! Hundreds of years ago with only basic tools, the Maori dried food and carried it around in air tight bags, the Pōhā bags they made could store their dried food for up to three years.

Here’s the thing that distinguishes Real Meals – in our view making them the best freeze dried food in the world.

The name says it all – we call our meals Real Meals because that’s the most accurate way to describe them. They are real!

In our production kitchen, Jason our highly qualified and internationally experienced chef, cooks all the meals with care and craftsmanship. If you time it right, you could pop into the factory and enjoy the meals as they come fresh out of the pot. The entire meal is then put through the freeze drying process. The product you get was a home-style chef-prepared meal, all the flavours infused with each other, and the meal was blended to taste great.

Compare this to how most other freeze dried meals are made. Other companies freeze dry the ingredients separately. They then simply mix the dry ingredients together to make the meals. It’s an assembly line, not a culinary creation. This process is cheap and easy, but it’s never going to result in a pleasurable dining experience. Because the ingredients are just packed in like blocks of Lego. Flavour enhancers and other nasty stuff is often added to try and get the ingredients to work together into something remotely edible.

We couldn’t stomach these type of meals any longer and that’s why we started Real Meals. We have no interest putting another cheap and basic freeze dried meal on the market, we only want the tastiest, best meals possible, with premium ingredients and made with care.