There Are Dehydrated Backpacking Meals for Dogs, and They’re So Good I Kind of Want to Eat One

My dog was drooling as she watched my friends eat their dehydrated backpacking meals. We’d just hiked seven miles to our campsite, and everyone had worked up an appetite. Korra stared, licking her lips and pleading with her eyes for a bite.

She was about to enjoy a backpacking meal of her own, though. A Puppackr “Chicken Dog Food” pouch was cooking right beside my own Backpacker’s Pantry dinner. If she could only read the packaging, she’d know she was in for a treat.

Weeks prior, I’d come across the brand at Outside Days in Denver. Puppackr makes dehydrated backpacking meals for your four-legged hiking companions. The pouches come in different sizes for different-sized dogs and use real ingredients, just like human backpacking meals. They cost about the same as well.

I was skeptical, but my curiosity was also piqued. If nothing else, it seemed like a novel idea and a fun way to include my dog in the time-honored backpacking tradition of eating dehydrated food out of a bag.

Now, I probably know what some of you are thinking: Kibble is essentially dehydrated dog food. Why would I spend extra money on a single meal for my dog, rather than just bringing a ziplock of what they’re fed at home?

That’s a fair enough question. But this is more than a novelty product, according to Puppacker’s founder, Jenny Phillips. As she explained to me, the idea was born out of necessity. Her own dog, Chopper, is an extremely picky eater when he’s in the backcountry. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any dog food he would eat on the trail.

“When I first started backpacking with him, the food wound up being such a barrier,” Phillips said.

So, Phillips created her own solution. She based the original Puppackr recipe on the vet-recommended “bland diet,” and started dehydrating chicken, rice, and pumpkin at home. It worked. Just like that, Chopper started eating on backpacking trips, and Phillips realized her solution could help other dogs, too. She started bringing extra dehydrated dog food on backpacking trips to share with other picky canines, and their owners loved the idea.

Puppackr has been on the market since March, and so far, it only has one flavor for dogs — the Chicken Dog Food flavor I had for Korra. The meal has just four main ingredients: chicken, white rice, pumpkin powder, and ground flaxseed (which Phillips’ vet recommended adding for extra fiber). That combination is supposed to settle dogs’ stomachs.

Maybe I was just hungry, too, but the meal sounded pretty good as I read the ingredients while Korra and I waited. I was eager to get her thoughts when it was ready.

The Results

Full disclosure: Korra is not a picky eater. She would have scarfed kibble if that had what I’d brought.

That said, I could tell she loved the Puppackr meal. The biggest issue I had was making sure she didn’t eat it too fast. It was well portioned for her size (I got the medium, and she’s a 53-pound dog) and smelled great. Perhaps predictably, she licked the bag clean.

After a long day of exercise, it was a healthy, hearty, well-earned meal. She was regular the following day — no upset stomach, no digestive issues. That’s exactly the outcome this recipe was designed to deliver.

At 5.73 ounces per package, Puppackers add negligible weight to your backpack. It’s probably slightly more weight-efficient than regular kibble in a bag. At $9 to $14 per package, however, it is not cheap. For an overnight backpack, as I did, the cost isn’t too bad. For longer trips, that would add up.

Some dogs might be sensitive to chicken, which is why the next flavor coming out of Puppackr will be beef-based. Phillips said she wants this to be a viable solution for as many pups as possible. She knows how happy Chopper is when he’s on the trail wearing his pack, she says. She wants to spread that joy to other dogs.

Puppackr certainly made Korra’s backpacking experience a treat. In fact, I might have created a monster — now she knows what’s inside those weird bags the humans always eat out of on backpacking trips, and if she doesn’t have her own, she knows she’s missing out.