San Francisco, CA (February 13, 2020) – A healthier, better tasting meal option for the outdoors is now available. Next Mile Meals provides low-carb and keto-friendly freeze-dried meals, with each recipe carefully crafted on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and trail-tested under the most extreme conditions.

Traditional hiker and backpacker diets are carb-focused, including meals like mac & cheese, alfredo pasta, and even candy bars. This is because carbs are lightweight, dehydrate easily, and are cheap to produce. Next Mile Meals is a better option, since all of the company’s meals are fewer than 10 net carbs each, compared to the 50+ net carbs of the leading competitor. When you take away the cheap rice, pasta, and potatoes and replace those ingredients with quality meats and cheese and vegetables, the meals are tastier, healthier, and more filling.

“Whether you follow a ketogenic or paleo diet, are managing a health issue with your nutrition, or are just looking for less-processed, better-tasting backcountry meals, Next Mile Meals helps make the outdoors more accessible for every kind of adventurer,” says Jessie Greger, Founder and CEO of Next Mile Meals. “More than half of our customers aren’t keto; even hikers on a traditional diet prefer our meals as a ‘cleaner’ protein and calorie source than what is currently available in the stores. People have been craving a better trail food, and we’re happy to help expand the options available to them in the backcountry.”

In 2017, Greger found herself at mile one of the Pacific Crest Trail, about to begin the two-thousand, six-hundred and fifty mile trek from Mexico to Canada. That’s not a unique story: it’s a trail that thousands attempt each year, and a few hundred complete successfully. Her diet, however, was unique. She completed the hike ketogenically: a diet extremely low in carbs and sugar, which is fundamentally not possible with conventional trail food. Since she was unable to find any meals in stores that met her nutritional needs, she made her own. Greger designed six hand-made, carefully crafted meals that withstood the ultimate trail-test: she ate them every day, for five months, through three states, and one successful thru-hike.

When the hiking community heard that there was a ketogenic thru-hiker that had completed the PCT, people came out of the woodwork to ask, “How?? And how can we do the same?” So, together with her partner Christopher Bowns, who was carefully packing each meal and mail dropping and shipping them to her along the trail, Greger launched Next Mile Meals, offering the first ever low carb, ketogenic freeze-dried meal for hikers, backpackers and campers.

“Keto is not a fad for me, it’s been a core part of my life for nearly 10 years,” continued Greger. “To take my ketogenic lifestyle on the trail, prove it could be done, and share my success with the hiking community not only opened doors for me, but for thousands of others as well. We not only ‘talk the talk’ when it comes to healthy backcountry meals, we ‘walk the walk’ and, in this case, ‘hike the hike.’”

Next Mile Meals offers eight meal options: Sausage Scramble; Italian Meatball; Beef Tacos; Denver Omelette; Chicken & Broccoli; Buffalo Ranch Chicken; Coconut Chicken Curry; and Deli Roast Beef. For more information on Next Mile Meals, visit nextmilemeals.com.