DYI MRE. Let’s see how many more acronyms we can squeeze into there, shall we! My latest “prepper” experiment (all my husband’s idea) was a Do It Yourself Meal Ready to Eat. (DYI MRE).

Per usual with our prepping stuff, we stopped at Costco to see what we could find. If you remember from a few posts ago we picked up a food saver vacuum sealer at our last prepper purchase at Costco. This item is essential to the packaging of an MRE.

My hubby upgraded phones a few months ago at Costco and got a $100 Costco card to use. He wanted to see how much stuff he could get for DIY MRE’s with that card and what kind of pack we could put together. We ended up spending about $5 dollars over (making the total $105 ISH) and we got enough products to make 12 full MRE kits. However, we have plenty of leftovers for future kits if we restocked the supplies, OR we could put other leftover items until we got to 2000 calories and make a whole new/different MRE kit.

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We filled our kits with 8 items:

1.       Premier Protein Bar
– 200 Calories

2.       Signature Trail Mix Snacks
– 400 Calories

3.       Clif Bar Mini Nutrition Bar
– 260 calories

4.       Chicken of the Sea
(is it chicken or fish?!)- 100 Calories

5.       Nature Valley Crunchy Granola Bars
– 190 Calories

6.       Pacific Gold Original Beef Jerky
– 90 calories

7.       Happy Squeeze Organic Superfoods Fruit & Veggie Twist
– 70 calories

8.       Maruchan Ramen Noodle Soup
– 380 calories

We also put a paper towel and a plastic fork, knife and spoon in there. According to the Military, MRE’s the average caloric value of an entire MRE package is roughly 1250 calories. This DIY MRE has roughly 1690 Calories.

I know this blog isn’t the longest blog I’ve ever done. It’s really pretty simple and easy to put together! The more calories you can pack into an MRE the better. A good minimum number of calories is 2000.

If you don’t have a food saver you could pack things in a ziplock bag, but for the sake of space, I highly recommend that you invest in a food saver system. It’s very helpful for making mini survival kits, packing meat that you find on sale at the store etc.

Enjoy! I hope you learned a lot from this very brief tutorial on how to make your own DIY MRE’s.

-Cheers

Nila