Food on a multi-day hike is a personal thing — one hiker's dehydrated curry is another's crushed wrap disaster — so everyone plans their own food, while food drops are shared by the whole pack.
Three Ways To Record Food Weight
Weights below are shown in whichever units you picked in your profile — grams and kilograms, or ounces and pounds. See Miles Or Kilometres.
Weighing every muesli bar isn't everyone's idea of a good time, so the Food tab offers three ways to record what your food weighs. You only need to fill in one — pick the one that matches how much detail you want:
| Mode | What you enter | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Detailed plan | Every item, in the meal grid | Planners who want per-meal control |
| Daily totals | One number per day | "About 800 g a day" — most people |
| One total | One number for the whole trip | "6 kg of food, sorted" — divided by days |
To see the three and switch, tap the Tracking food weight line at the top of the Food tab. It names the one you're using and opens to show the others.
Switching between them never deletes anything — build a detailed plan, try daily totals, switch back, and your meals are exactly where you left them.
Whichever you choose feeds your backpack weight on the itinerary, and decides what shows up in each food drop's packing list.
Your Meal Plan
Choose Detailed plan and the Food tab gives you a grid: every day of the hike × breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Fill each meal with items — name, weight in grams, optional notes. Weights total up per meal and per day, so you know what your food bag actually costs your back.
On a phone the plan comes a day at a time. A grid of every day sits at the top, with four small bars under each one, one per meal, coloured by where that meal's food comes from. A dot marks a day you pick up a food drop. Tap a day, use the arrows, or swipe sideways over the meals to move between days, and tap a meal to open it.
Eating in town that night? Mark the meal off-trail — it's part of the plan but doesn't need items in your pack.
Checking Your Food Drop Tags
Pack Hiker points out meals that may be on the wrong food drop, with a note above the plan and a mark on each one (on a phone, a small warning sign on the day too). It looks for two things:
- A later drop comes first. Day 8's lunch is tagged to the day 3 drop, or carried from the start, but you reach another of your drops on day 6. That food was most likely meant to come from the day 6 drop.
- The drop comes too late. The meal is tagged to a drop you don't reach until after you eat it.
Food eaten on the day you reach a drop is fine either way, since you walk in carrying the old food. Only drops that resupply you, and that are on the itinerary, count. It's only a warning: if you really are carrying something past a resupply, leave it as it is.
Moving And Copying Food Around
Plans change, and so do the days you'll eat things on. You can move and copy food between meals without retyping it.
On a computer, hover an item in the grid:
- Copy it — press the copy icon beside the edit and delete buttons, then click the meal cell you want it in.
- Move it — drag it by the grip handle at the start of the row onto another meal cell.
The cell you took the food from turns green while you're choosing where it goes, and every cell that can take it picks up a dashed outline. It's one action: the highlight clears as soon as the food lands, so press copy again for the next day. To back out without changing anything, click the green cell — or press Esc.
On a phone, open the meal and press Copy to days or Move to day:
- Every item in the meal gets a tick box, all ticked to start with. Untick anything that should stay where it is.
- Under Into, choose the meal it lands in. It's the same meal unless you change it, so a muesli bar can go from snacks into lunch, on the same day if you like.
- Tap the days it should go to. A copy can go to several days at once; a move goes to one. Then press the button at the bottom.
A couple of things worth knowing. Off-trail meals are never offered as a destination, because there's nothing to pack for them. And a meal's food drop tag doesn't travel — it says where that day's food is collected, which belongs to the day rather than to the food, so the meal arrives untagged and you can point it at the right drop.
Tip: Curious what the others are packing? The Group Plans view lets you browse your packmates' plans — good for stealing ideas, or coordinating a shared dinner.
Suggested Assignments
Working out which meals come from which food drop is a job for whoever planned the resupply, not something each hiker should have to re-derive. So once the hike owner or a co-admin has tagged their own detailed plan, they can press Suggest to pack — and everyone else gets a banner on their Food tab offering to apply the same tagging.
Accepting replaces your own food drop and off-trail tagging across the hike: meals the suggestion tags get tagged, and meals it leaves blank lose the tag you'd set. You're told how many change before you confirm. What you're eating is never touched — your items, weights and notes stay exactly as they are. If you haven't started a food plan yet, the suggestion becomes a one-click Start with their suggestions button instead.
You're free to ignore it (No thanks), and to change any meal afterwards — accepting is a starting point, not a lock.
A hike has one suggestion at a time. The owner and co-admins can each replace or withdraw the other's, and republishing asks the whole pack again from scratch — anything already accepted stays put. Suggestions only apply to the detailed plan, and are withdrawn automatically if the hike dates move or a food drop they rely on is deleted.
Food Drops
Food drops are resupply caches — a box mailed ahead, a car stashed at a trailhead, a friend meeting you at a road crossing. Drops belong to the hike, not one person:
- give each a name, colour and icon, plus notes (where exactly, who's bringing it, collection hours…)
- place it on the map — hit Pick on map in the drop's form and click the spot, or click one of your unused route waypoints to use that instead
- schedule it onto the itinerary day you'll collect it
- link its costs — the food, the postage, a holding fee — from the Expenses tab, and they show on the drop's itinerary row
Then tell Pack Hiker which food comes from which drop, and you can see exactly what needs to go into each box before you leave. How you do that depends on your mode:
- Detailed plan — tag individual meals ("day 5 and day 6 dinners come from Middle Creek box")
- Daily totals — tag whole days to a drop
- One total — nothing to tag; your total is divided across the legs between drops automatically
Each hiker does this in their own plan, so a drop's packing list covers the whole pack. Anything you don't tag is treated as carried from the start of the hike.
What Goes In Each Box
Every drop gets a card. Across the top: the drop's name and notes, and the day it's collected. Under that, three figures — what the box weighs, how many hikers have food in it, and how many separate items go in. Then Contributions, one line per hiker with what they're putting in ("2 dinners · 1 lunch · snacks") and what their share weighs.
Below that, Packing list opens the contents in full: two hikers side by side, every item with the meal it belongs to and its weight. That's the panel to have open while you're actually filling the box.
Printing The Packing List
Print list, at the foot of the open packing list, downloads that one drop as a PDF: the hike's cover photo, the drop's details and totals, then every hiker's items with an empty tick box beside each one. Pack the box, tick the paper. It's a Pro feature, and it's one drop per sheet — print the one you're filling today rather than the whole trip.
The app's own list is deliberately read-only. Ticking things off there would give every member their own private copy of the answer, which is exactly the confusion a shared cache doesn't need.
Schedule every drop onto a day. The packing list works either way, but a drop that isn't on a day never appears on the itinerary — so nobody sees it on the morning they're meant to collect it, and it's missing from the printed plan.
Offline Behaviour
Your own meals and items can be edited offline — perfect for refining the plan on the trail or in a dead-reception campsite. Changes save to your device and sync when you're back online. If the plan changed elsewhere in the meantime, Pack Hiker shows you a conflict prompt so nothing is silently overwritten. Food drops themselves are shared, so creating or editing drops needs a connection.