My Patriot Supply Review – Ready Hour Food

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Key Points:

• My Patriot Supply‘s 4-week Ready Hour food buckets have a good variety of foods with a long shelf life.
• The food is decent and the price is fair.
• I have no Patriot Food Supply complaints.

Preppers are probably already familiar with the big names in the freeze-dried food market: Valley Food Storage, Mountain House, etc. My Patriot Supply is another seller that launched in 2008. While I have tested the freeze-dried coffee they sell, this is the first time I have prepared any of the meals their meals.

Freeze-dried foods have exceptionally long shelf lives (often 25-30 years), and that’s why they’re so popular in the personal preparedness market. They offer a convenient way to stock food without having to worry about rotating stock, expiration dates, etc. FMI see my article on a Prepper’s Guide to Freeze-Dried Foods.

Assuming you already know the benefits of freeze-dried foods, let’s move to My Patriot Supply itself…

My Patriot Supply

My Patriot Supply operates on the motto: It’s not just food. It’s freedom. It was founded by Matt Redhawk, and he states:

My Patriot Supply is a trusted platform for purchasing everything from survival items to emergency food. It carries a high number of different products that are all sold online to people across the country. The idea is to ensure that nobody finds themselves in a life-threatening situation without the necessary resources to survive.

https://www.superbcrew.com/an-interview-with-matt-redhawk-ceo-and-the-founder-of-my-patriot-supply/

As one would imagine with a name like theirs, the products they sell are made in the U.S.

Their prices online are more than competitive, so I wanted to see if they’re just offering a fair deal or if the products are sub-par, but it should be clarified here that this is a review of My Patriot Supply products and not My Patriot Supply food…

In other words, the company does not make its own food, they are a distributor of freeze-dried foods that others produce.

For example, for freeze-dried coffee they sell Franklin’s Finest Coffee. When it comes to food, they sell Ready Hour brand. So, while this article is a review of My Patriot Supply the company, it’s also a review of Ready Hour’s 4-Week Food Supply, the supply I purchased for this review.

Ready Hour Review – 4-Week Emergency Food Supply

Ready Hour’s 4-week emergency food supply comes in two buckets. The buckets are sealed tight. You have to open them by ripping the plastic seal around the lid.

The contents of these buckets can be seen in the image at the top of this article, spilled out over my kitchen island. To get a more precise breakdown of what I received in these buckets, see the following chart:

Dish	Shelf Life (Years)	Pouches Included	Servings per Pouch
Strawberry Flavored Creamy Wheat	25	1	8
Buttermilk Pancake Mix	30	3	10
Maple Grove Oatmeal	25	4	8
Southwest Rice	25	5	4
Long Grain White Rice	30	3	10
Creamy Chicken Flavored Rice	25	4	4
Mashed Potatoes	25	1	8
Homestyle Potato Soup	25	5	4
Cheesy Broccoli Soup	25	2	4
Black Bean Soup	25	2	4
Traveler’s Stew	25	3	4
Creamy Stroganoff	25	1	4
Mac & Cheese	25	3	4
Banana Chips	10	1	8
Chocolate Pudding	25	2	10
Orange Energy Drink Mix	30	2	8
Total	N/A	42	102

I have sampled my fair share of freeze-dried foods from different manufacturers over the years. I have done this for written reviews, but also by simply eating them on outdoor excursions, mainly hiking.

More often than not, however, the foods I’ve eaten while hiking were more in the style of “just add boiling water and let sit.” Those are the ideal foods for outdoor trips or to put in a bug out backpack, because they require less water, are more simple in their cooking, and don’t require much in the way of dishes. In other words – lightweight and simple.

The packets of food in these Ready Hour buckets are different, however. You will not be just adding boiling water to the packet itself, but instead boiling the water in a pot with the contents, whisking and giving it time to properly cook. The disadvantage here is obvious – more water, time, and dirtying of cookware. The advantage is something else – better quality food.

When it comes to cooking, it’s often the case where quality and taste are compromised with speed and simplicity. The meals in these buckets are designed less for backpacking (though they could still be used for that), and more for longer-term at-home meals. They are prepackaged meals that you could serve your family, save for leftovers, etc.

In order to get a decent sampling for this review, I chose three meals to break open: Mac & Cheese, Maple Grove Oatmeal, and Traveler’s Stew. In each of these, I rated the meal, my wife rated the meal, and the kids did as well.

Mac & Cheese

Cooking the Ready Hour mac and cheese was not that different from making Kraft mac and cheese except that everything was included but the water itself (as opposed to also needing butter and milk for Kraft).

This dish was made in combination with other dishes as part of a larger dinner. In this case, I made a packet of Kraft mac and cheese and Ready Hour’s. See the two side-by-side below, Kraft on the left and Ready Hour on the right.

Our ratings below need to be kept in context. My wife and I rated the dish in comparison to comparable packaged meals. In other words, we’re not comparing it to a dish of homemade baked mac and cheese coming fresh out of the oven. No packaged meal will ever taste like a homemade dish. It’s just not possible.

What we are comparing it to is the packaged foods you would find at your typical grocery store. Kraft is the most obvious example here.

My Rating	Wife’s Rating	Kids’ Rating
8 out of 10	8 out of 10	6 out of 10

My wife and I both gave this dish an 8 out of 10. This is a considerably strong rating given that Ready Hour’s meal has a life span about 10 times longer than any similar product you’d buy at the store.

The kids, preferring Kraft (as most kids do), refused to acknowledge that it was surprisingly good.

Maple Grove Oatmeal

The next morning I ripped into Ready Hour’s Maple Grove Oatmeal. Similar to the above example, I wasn’t going to compare this to making Quaker old fashioned oatmeal from whole oats. We did, however, compare it to Quaker’s instant oatmeal, a more comparable product.

I’m not a big fan of instant oatmeal, so that probably swayed my rating downward a notch. That said, it did taste remarkably similar to any instant oatmeal you’d buy off the shelf, only with that 10x shelf life that you are looking for with freeze-dried foods.

There was no need to add anything beyond water to the dish as it came with maple flavoring and brown sugar inside. That flavoring was noticeable and not all that different from what you would expect with a bit of brown sugar and maple syrup added to Quaker’s instant oatmeal.

My Rating	Wife’s Rating	Kids’ Rating
7 out of 10	7 out of 10	5 out of 10

The kids’ rating of a 5 is not bad considering they don’t like oatmeal at all.

Traveler’s Stew

Traveler’s Stew is a hearty mix of pasta, lentils, carrots, celery, onion, and chicken broth. The lentils give the stew the heft one would want and need in a disaster situation.

I made this dish for myself. My wife, a vegetarian (more on that in a moment) opted out as it’s made with chicken broth. My son had some the next day as heated up leftovers.

My Opinion	Wife’s Opinion	Son’s Opinion
8 out of 10	N/A	7 out of 10

This stew was not bad as a packaged meal. My son’s rating of a 7 speaks to that. Short of a milk shake or a hamburger, he won’t give much of anything a 10 out of 10, so 7 is a strong rank.

Where’s the Beef?

As I mentioned, my wife didn’t sample the Traveler’s Stew because she’s a vegetarian and that dish is made with chicken stock. Chicken stock being in a few dishes was the exception to an otherwise entirely vegetarian assortment of foods. This might come as a shock to some, but I have no beef with that (pun intended).

Many freeze-dried dishes that you buy include some type of meat. For me, Ready Hour’s 4-week assortment of food was a welcome relief from that. A lot of people prefer meat with every dish, and while I enjoy a good steak or some chicken wings, two members of the family are vegetarians. These buckets of food would largely satisfy their dietary preferences.

Want meat? No problem – My Patriot Supply offers plenty of meat-based meals.

Is there Really 4 Weeks’ Worth?

These two buckets are sold under the premise that they will provide one person with four weeks’ worth of food. Is that really the case?

There are a few ways to look at it:

• Are there enough servings to last 4 weeks?
• Are there enough calories to last 4 weeks?

Ready Hour’s argument is based on the assumption that one person needs 2,000 calories per day. Twenty-eight days at two-thousand calories per day equals 56,000 calories. I did not count the calories per serving, but I will take them at their word that there are 56,000 calories in these two buckets.

I am sure that if push came to shove and it was TEOTWAWKI, I could live for 4 weeks on these two buckets of food. I am also sure it wouldn’t be easy. Eating nothing but freeze-dried food can get old fast. A few days in and you’ll be feeling desperate for a piece of real fruit or something fresh off the grill.

This is the nature of any food, however. Eat the same type of food for any length of time and you will grow tired of it. Our bodies crave dietary diversity. This is why I see freeze-dried foods of this type as a supplement to other food stores, not as the end-all be-all to long-term food storage.

You’ll also want to store real rice, be able to make hot coffee after the apocalypse, and be able to add some fresh meat with a simple squirrel gun. Having food from a variety of sources in a variety of styles will help you stay interested in eating the day’s meals during a catastrophic event.

My Patriot Supply Food Complaints?

I have no complaints with My Patriot Supply. The order came in a timely manner, everything was well-packaged, and the foods were as good as any comparable products. Their prices are also very reasonable.

Would I recommend them? Yes.