4Patriots 72-Hour Food Kit Honest Review: Worth It for a Household?

The box is smaller than you picture. That was the first thing nobody mentioned to me about the 4Patriots 72-Hour Survival Food Kit. It came last November, and I set the box with both kits in it on the hall closet shelf and thought: that is it? Twenty servings in a box that size looks like a bank statement in an envelope. I had spent thirty years carrying mail through every kind of weather without a plan of any kind, and then a storm the summer before got my attention. My husband Hollis and I are two people in a farmhouse at the end of a gravel road. Two kits, one for each of us, was as far as my thinking went. Then January came and we ate from one of them.

Here is the second thing nobody tells you, and it is the one that decides whether the box is right for your house. This is not food you tear open and eat standing at the counter. It is dry food in sealed pouches. You add boiling water and simmer, and the listing puts the whole thing at about 15 minutes start to finish. So a food kit is only half a meal plan. The other half is water and a heat source you already own and already know how to run outdoors. I am not saying that to run the product down. I am saying it because I bought mine without turning it over in my head, and if you are reading this in the same frame of mind, you deserve to hear the catch from a person instead of a label.

How I've Used It

Late January, freezing rain moved in on a Tuesday afternoon and brought a limb down on the line about six in the evening. The power stayed out three days and came back Friday around noon. We are at the end of a gravel road and we are usually among the last ones back on. In between, Hollis and I ate six meals out of one kit and never opened the second.

Wednesday evening I carried the box from the hall closet to the kitchen and read the back of a pouch twice before I did anything with it. We have a two-burner propane camp stove that lives on the back porch, and that is where it stays, because a camp stove indoors is a fine way to poison your household. Outside is the only place I will run one and the only place I would tell you to run one. We had two small cylinders on hand. We used one and part of the second across those three days.

I had let the camp stove lighter go missing. That one is on me, and it was one of three things that went wrong that week. I lit the burners with kitchen matches and it worked fine, and I have since bought a spare lighter that lives with the stove. Water came to a boil, the pouches went in, and about fifteen minutes later we were eating off paper plates in the den with the wood stove going and the room sitting at about 62 degrees.

Six meals is what one kit gave us between Wednesday evening and Friday midday, the two of us eating together. The other two things that went wrong, for the record, were the refrigerator food, which had to go on the third day, and the cell signal, which dropped on the Wednesday and came back Thursday. That is the entire list. Nobody was hurt, nothing else was lost or broken, and the second kit went back on the shelf still sealed.

Six meals came out of one kit and the second kit never left the shelf. That is the number I plan from now, not the number on the front of the box.

The Calorie Math Nobody Puts on the Front of the Box

The listing says an average of 4,800 total calories, about 1,600 a day, and then, right in the same breath, that you may want or need more. I appreciate the honesty. I also want you to do the arithmetic before you buy, because I did not do it before I bought.

One kit works out to roughly one person for three days at 1,600 calories a day. Two people for three days is two kits. That is not a marketing problem, it is just what the food weighs out to. And 1,600 calories is light if you are hauling limbs off a driveway or walking a quarter mile up the road to check on a neighbor. Hollis and I sat in a den at about 62 degrees and did very little, and even then I noticed it by Friday morning.

So the number I carry into the store now is people, not days. Count the people in your house and buy that many kits for a three-day event. Want a week? Double it, and be honest with yourself about the water while you are at it. The box does not hide any of this. The front of it says 72 hours, and 72 hours is exactly what it means.

The Two Things It Asks of You: Water and Heat

Every pouch needs water and it needs heat. Not warm tap water, boiling water and then a simmer. That is a real requirement in a real outage, because the same storm that takes your power is often the one that takes your water pressure or puts a boil notice on the tap.

We keep six gallons of bottled water in that closet. When the ice was gone we had about two gallons left, and part of what we drank went into the food. If you buy food kits and nothing else, you have bought the easy half of the job and left the hard half at the store.

Heat is the other half. Propane camp stove, outside, on a porch or a patio, never in the kitchen and never in a garage with the door down. If you do not own one, work that into the budget before you buy food. A gas grill with a side burner does the same work. What will not do the work is an electric range with no power.

I will say the plain thing, because the plain thing is what I would want told to me. A food kit is a cooking supply, not a ready-to-eat supply. If the picture in your head is opening a pouch in the dark, that picture does not match this product. Match it to a pot, a burner and a jug of water, or pick something else for the shelf.

What the Meals Actually Tasted Like

We ate mac and cheese, a sweet oatmeal, and a creamy rice and vegetable. The pouches take boiling water and thicken as they sit, so the texture lands closer to a thick porridge than to anything you would call supper at home.

Hollis thought the mac and cheese was fine and the oatmeal too sweet. He is a man who would put sugar on sugar, so make of that what you like. The oatmeal was the one I would move to the back of the shelf. The rice and vegetable was the one I would eat on an ordinary Tuesday, and I do not say that about much that comes out of a pouch.

What I noticed more than flavor was how it sat in us. A pouch made a bowl each. It was warm and filling, and hot food on a cold night on a porch with the power out counts for more than any score out of ten I could give it. Do not buy this expecting a restaurant. Do buy it expecting a hot meal, because that is exactly what it is.

The Shelf Life Claim and What I Can Actually Verify

The listing says designed for up to 25 years in storage, and tells you to keep it below 75 degrees. I have owned mine about twelve months. I cannot tell you a pouch lasts 25 years. Nobody writing a review this soon can tell you that. What I can tell you is what the pouch is: triple-layer mylar, sealed, built to keep out heat, air and moisture.

My closet is an ordinary inside closet in a heated house, and that is where both kits sit, together in the one box, on a shelf. It is not a cellar and it is not climate controlled. That matters if your storage is a shed or an attic. A shed in a Tennessee summer sits above 75 degrees for months at a stretch, and I would not store food out there and neither should you.

The Canned Pantry Beside It

We also keep a canned pantry, with a hand can opener on the shelf beside it, because a can does not need water and does not need fifteen minutes. In the ice storm we did not touch it. The kits came out and the cans stayed put, mostly because I had just bought the kits and wanted to know what was in them.

I am not going to tell you the box replaces the pantry. It does not. The cans are cheaper and more familiar and you can eat half of one and put the rest in the refrigerator if the refrigerator is still cold. What the kit does that the pantry does not is sit there for a long stretch without being rotated and still be a full meal with a date on it.

If you are choosing between the two, choose the pantry first and add the kit second. If you already have the pantry and you are wondering whether the box earns its shelf space, this is the answer I would give you over the fence: yes, one kit per person, on the closet shelf.

What I Would Do Differently

Buy the spare lighter before the storm and not after. That is the small one. The bigger one is that I would have counted the water against the food instead of counting them as two separate things I happened to own. Six gallons sounds like plenty until you are boiling with some of it and drinking the rest.

And I would have read the back of a pouch on a sunny afternoon instead of by flashlight. The instructions are not complicated. Boiling water, fifteen minutes, stir. But reading them for the first time in the middle of an outage is a poor way to learn anything, and there is no reason to do it that way when the box is going to sit on your shelf for months anyway.

What I would not change is buying two. One kit fed the two of us for six meals and the second kit stayed sealed, and I still keep one per person.

Who This Is For

This is for the household that already has a way to boil water outside and wants a floor under them that does not require a plan. Two people, one kit each, a shelf in a hall closet. It is for the neighbor who knows they should have something and keeps putting it off, which was me for thirty years of carrying mail.

It is also for anyone who has thought about building a three-day food box themselves and found the grocery list less fun than expected. I know how heavy a case of canned goods is to carry up a porch step and I know the 4Patriots box is lighter and easier to store. That trade is most of the argument.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you have no way to boil water outdoors and no plan to get one. Skip it if you want food you can eat cold straight out of the package, because this is not that, and a food bar in a bag is. This is a pot meal and it needs a pot.

Skip it if you are feeding four people and buying one box. That is a three-day supply for one person, and the arithmetic does not care what the front of the box says. And skip it if you have no cool, dry place to keep it, because the 4Patriots kit asks you to hold up your end of the storage for as long as you own it.