Rogue Food Unites: Freeze-Dried Meals for Quick Nutrition in Disaster

In June 2024, RFU completed the construction of a commercial kitchen to develop a line of Freeze-Dried Meals as an innovative approach to disaster preparedness that addresses a critical gap identified during the 2020 Oregon wildfires: the lack of nutritious, scalable, shelf-stable, tasty meals for emergency response.

Ultimately, success for the Freeze-Dried Meals Program means transforming disaster response from labor-intensive volunteer coordination to streamlined distribution, replacing dozens and dozens of volunteers, multiple vehicles, and complex logistics with one truck delivering thousands of meals to emergency shelters. This efficiency multiplies community resilience while maintaining RFU's core values of local procurement and high-quality nutrition.

The goal of the Freeze-Dried Meals program is threefold: to provide healthy, flavorful nourishment to disaster-affected people; to strengthen the local food system by prioritizing locally sourced ingredients in production; and to act as a sustainable source of income for RFU’s community-facing programming, including the Farmers Market.

In addition to preparing our state for disaster through quality, tasty, and easy-to-prepare food, this program will reduce food insecurity and create economic and community resilience.

In times of financial hardship–and in efforts to respond to emergencies as they arise–prevention and preparation are the first things to go unfunded or underfunded.  We believe that more investment in preparation and prevention is going to be significant in continuing to build community resilience, both day-to-day and in times of disaster.