# Raft Trip Food Planning, Shopping, & Packing



## tylermacguire

Thanks for posting this...It is very helpful! Would you be willing to share your spreadsheets???


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## River Malt

The spreadsheets sound great! I would also be interested in the spreadsheet. Sharing or thinking about publishing the spreadsheet?


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## SummitSurfer

RIGHT! You have sold us on the spreadsheets! Post the file! THEN when you have given us the file and we are free to use it, you should take that and make a program out of it and sell it!!! Your software idea will be a hit because no one else is writting software for it!!!
****


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## lhowemt

Thanks Mogur- That explains where you are coming from. For my first Grand Canyon trip, I did the menu planning, 3-4 other people did the shopping, then about 4 of us did the packing. It ended up being a huge burden on us (I think I spent 40 hours ahead of time planning and tweaking and people still whined), and it still was a bit of a cluster [email protected]#$ on the river with other people trying to figure out what was where (when the ones that knew were out hiking or such). I swore I'd never do that again, and like that now we are each responsible for our own meals. If anyone ever let their food go bad, they'd not only be strung up on the trip, they'd never be invited back on a trip with this pretty closely knit group. I really can't imagine that happening, what total assholes! Everyone knows what is expected of them, and has proven that they do in the past.


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## rbrain

If you post your food spreadsheets or algorithms I'd be willing to code/program in a food planner on riverbrain.com that anyone could use and store to their profiles.


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## lhowemt

I just want to be clear that I do not intend to dis your method at all even though my experience has led me to a different solution. I too would appreciate the spreadsheets as template for my own menu items. Although I seem to make the same thing over and over it's always for a different # of people and I am always reinventing it. Plus with trips with few people I do have to think outside my comfort zone when I have to make a lot more meals.


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## Rich

My work life is heavily dependent on computers and spreadsheets.
I try to keep computers out of my river life (except checking flows and chatting with all you fine folks).

Learned on my first GC trip: KISS!

16 days and 16 people seems easy: each person gets one day (dinner, breakfast and lunch). You have day #7, you plan menu, purchase groceries, carry on your boat, fix 3 meals, carry all leftovers and garbage from your 3 meals and then you are done! 

If you want to share the work, you can team with someone else or many others and do less work on more days.

If you have a passenger they would have day #8 so you can coordinate cooler storage. If you are solo you can coordinate cooler management with the people with days #6 or #8.

All grocery receipts are split by the whole group, so no advantage to bring P&J and no penalty to bring lobster. BTW we eat VERY well!

Any thing shorter than a GC trip, we make lunch BYO. All beverages but coffee are BYO.

All our trips are people who own their own boats. If you invite passengers, their gear and their food is on your boat. Typical GC trip would be 10 plus boats. Last MFS trip was 8 people/eight boats.

All group gear is split evenly by the number of boats.
If your boat is overloaded, you brought too many people, too much gear or too small of a boat, either way, its your problem, not mine.

KISS / YMMV


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## The Mogur

tylermacguire said:


> Thanks for posting this...It is very helpful! Would you be willing to share your spreadsheets???


There seems to be a demand here, and I'm a capitalist at heart. I'll have to think about what's the best way to market this. If I merely send out the spreadsheet, I'd have no way to prevent instant world-wide distribution, so that won't work. I'm thinking that I could offer the service for a fee based on the number of meals or days on a river trip. In any case, if I were to do that, I'd become a sponsoring advertiser on this site.

What would be a fair price? I'd send you the list of meals for you to choose from. You'd send me your selections. I'd return PDF files containing your individual meal sheets, plus shopping lists sorted according to the way you want to shop and pack.

Attached is a sample from a recent trip. We had six cook teams on that trip, so there were six sets of data like these, plus the general trip supplies list. Would your group be willing to pay something like $10-15 per river day for this kind of service? If so, I'll get to work and make it happen.


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## The Mogur

lhowemt said:


> For my first Grand Canyon trip, I did the menu planning, 3-4 other people did the shopping, then about 4 of us did the packing. It ended up being a huge burden on us. I think I spent 40 hours ahead of time planning and tweaking and people still whined, and it still was a bit of a cluster [email protected]#$ on the river with other people trying to figure out what was where.


Yep. You hit the nail squarely on the head. Not to mention having to recalculate all of the quantities because one couple dropped out at the last minute. Been there, done that!

No whining here, because they picked the meals. No disproportionate workload, no clusterforking on the river.


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## The Mogur

Rich said:


> Learned on my first GC trip: KISS! 16 days and 16 people seems easy: each person gets one day (dinner, breakfast and lunch). You have day #7, you plan menu, purchase groceries, carry on your boat, fix 3 meals, carry all leftovers and garbage from your 3 meals and then you are done!


That's pretty simple and direct. I can see some potential for whining, but the solution to that is pretty simple too (you whine, next time you stay home).


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## Rich

The Mogur said:


> That's pretty simple and direct. I can see some potential for whining, but the solution to that is pretty simple too (you whine, next time you stay home).


 
Guess I don't see what there is to whine about: 16 people. 16 days, everyone takes a day, can't get any fairer than that!
Never heard any whining on the GC!


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## The Mogur

Rich said:


> Guess I don't see what there is to whine about: 16 people. 16 days, everyone takes a day, can't get any fairer than that!
> Never heard any whining on the GC!


You obviously have a good group! No "Joe" along to burn up his ice; no food nazi to tell you what you should and shouldn't eat; nobody trying to skate by with lazy meals while the rest of the group actually puts some effort into making good meals; nobody innocently forgetting something of major importance; etc.

The only whining I heard on the GC trip was when we had to go home. And that was me!


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## lhowemt

We do also pre-coordinate our meals. Not only to minimize duplication, but to make sure no one brings beenie-weenies.


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## GBWW

*Kitchen meal planning*

I use Big Oven (it is an easy to use program that is on the internet.) You input a meal and all the items in it, tell it how many it is supposed to serve. Then when you are doing menu planning, you input how many people are on the trip and it adjusts quantities accordingly. You can then have it print up a shopping list to work from. ( It sets the shopping list up by category ie-canned, breads, meat, etc) You still have to organize all the food when you get back home.

I usually split the shopping up into three trips.

1-Non perishables (about 1-2 weeks pre trip)
2-Things that I can repackage and freeze (usually done a couple days pre trip)
3- Produce (day before we leave)

We have used this program for lots of trips. It works very well for us. The big downside for the program is inputing the meals, but that is what the off river season is for. I send out the menu ahead of time to everyone who is on the trip, and they can comment on the menu then. If no problems or needs for change occur, I don't listen to the complaining later.


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## carvedog

So not trying to get in the way of capitalism, but just sharing some spreads that I use. They are share ware, anyone who uses them owes me lots of beer. You can't edit these but you should be able to copy them I think, if not I will add your email and you can download or something. 

I use the first one to set a budget and try to get a handle on things. The second one is half way through to determine what needs to be shopped yet and such. 

The blank one without prices is used for checking everything off. I also double laminate that last one and put a couple in the kitchen box ( they make a great little cutting board too) for on the trip and keep one as a backup in my rocket. These don't have cooking directions and 'finite' quantities but you can get pretty close with this. 

First shopping menu ( not everything is filled in with a price as some things were left over or supplied by someone in the group): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah-pcJFjq-S9dGtRZDlwTVd1Uzg2aUl3YUJsSGx2Smc


With items color coded to indicate where to shop or if the price is gone and the box dark grey then that means it has been bought.:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...1T1kyV3FVT3M4TGdjMDJqMXl4Tmc&authkey=CLrV_9QG

Final ( with no prices to enable checking off during packing and this is from a different trip) : 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...xMlpYcE56Tk45ZEJSRVBEZlVwb3c&authkey=CLa659IB


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## Wounded Knee

As a participant on many Mogur-organized trips, I can vouch for the efficiency of the program. The meals are generally pretty straightforward but high quality. Every cook team build the meals as written and/or embellish. 

Before I went on a Mogur trip however, I borrowed the program to use for a couple of big Boy Scout trips on the Lower Salmon and Hell's Canyon. For Hell's we had 24 scouts and adults. The trip should have been a difficult CF with so many young, inexperienced boaters. The shopping, packing, and preparing was so well organized that meals were generally on time and prepared with few glitches. That's saying a lot for any youth group outing. The trip was the highlight of almost everyone's scouting career. And it got me back into rafting after taking a two-decade sabbatical.


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## sledhooligan

I'm with Rich on this one. Most groups I boat with do it this way. I would also recomend the more prep you do at home the better off you are once you get on the river. Meaning repacking with a seal-a-meal and cooking and freezing what you can. You wouldnt believe how much trash and room you can save by doing this.
However I'm not a big fan of BYO lunch. The only trip I've found this to work good is the MF becuase you dont have many chances to pull over and eat lunch. What I've seen with BYO lunch is added cost for the indavidual and alot of thrash. People seem to pack indavidualy packed lunch items and that genarates alot off uneeded trash. On most trips I don't think its a big deal to pull over prepare one lunch and be done with it.


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## Rich

sledhooligan said:


> I'm with Rich on this one. Most groups I boat with do it this way. I would also recomend the more prep you do at home the better off you are once you get on the river. Meaning repacking with a seal-a-meal and cooking and freezing what you can. You wouldnt believe how much trash and room you can save by doing this.
> However I'm not a big fan of BYO lunch. The only trip I've found this to work good is the MF becuase you dont have many chances to pull over and eat lunch. What I've seen with BYO lunch is added cost for the indavidual and alot of thrash. People seem to pack indavidualy packed lunch items and that genarates alot off uneeded trash. On most trips I don't think its a big deal to pull over prepare one lunch and be done with it.


Agree that BYO Lunch has the potential for more trash. We're pretty strict about it, your lunch is your trash not group trash. But on the other hand, big group lunches seem to have alot of leftovers. 
I personally would rather would rather eat a little, several times during the day, than a big lunch. Also the big group lunches eat up too much valuble daylight hours, finding an appropriate spot, set up, eat, wait around for the lunch crew to clean up and rerig etc. I would rather be hiking or scouting the next big rapid!


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