Oregon Freeze Dry is Mountain House vs Wise Food Company study, in a new study looking at some of the top pouch food storage meals on the market, the makers of Mountain House are showing via a 3rd party inspection that Wise Food Storage and others have sub-par packaging standards that will make it difficult for their food to stay safe over long periods of time.
Oxygen is the enemy of food stability. Think of the head of lettuce you bring home from the store. It starts to soften and deteriorate quickly. If you shred it up and place it in a zip lock bag after pushing as much air out as possible it will last a few extra days.
Food storage is no different. The more oxygen the faster the food goes bad. Dry air contains 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of additional gases. Nitrogen does not harm food stability. They key here is 21% oxygen. You need to remove as much as possible of this to assure your food will store for long periods. The US Military requests that their packaged goods have less than 2% oxygen levels.
The study points out that two brands in particular performed poorly at removing oxygen. Wise Foods and Food Supply Depot had 10% and almost 18% oxygen levels respectively. These numbers would be ok if the product and packaging they tested was 20 years old but it wasn’t, this was all product that was packaged in the last year.
Food Supply Depot’s performance of 18% is downright embarrassing. They were able to remove only 3% of oxygen with their packaging processes. Wise Food Company averaged 10% residual oxygen levels which was just over half the amount in the air we breathe but significantly higher than the top competitors.
What this means is you can be sure their foods will not be last as long as the competitors that are able to get their oxygen levels.
When we see responses from the two worse offenders we will update this post with their remarks.
Links to the Mountain House 3rd Party Residual Air Study can be seen here.
