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.
Your Meal Plan
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.
Eating in town that night? Mark the meal off-trail — it's part of the plan but doesn't need items in your pack.
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.
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 (or link it to a waypoint from your GPX file for exact coordinates)
- schedule it onto the itinerary day you'll collect it
Then assign meals to a drop: mark your day-5 and day-6 meals as coming from "Middle Creek box" and you can see exactly what needs to go into each box before you leave. Each hiker does this in their own plan, so a drop's contents cover the whole pack.
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.