Keeping food cold over a weekend camping trip is extremely straightforward. Some people even stretch it out to 5 days.
Get cooler. Add ice. No big deal, right?
The real challenge is keeping food cold for an entire week.
Accomplishing this feat requires both the proper gear and know-how.
I’ll help you with both.
Long-Term Camping Food Storage
If you’re able to invest in an electric solution, this is by far the most straightforward. Since this is a problem that goes away with a simple product purchase, I’m going to keep this as to the point as possible.
If you have access to electricity (which can be from an outlet OR a vehicle), buy this electric cooler from Coleman. It’s really not all that expensive, and it works fantastic.
Infinite cold. Problem solved.
Now on to the real challenge. Keeping food cold without electricity.
Here’s what you need to keep your food cold for up to a week:
- Well-insulated, sealed storage
- Long-lasting source of cold
- A way to monitor temperature
- A way to protect your storage from heat
The Cooler for Long-Term Camping Food Storage
There are two main elements to a good long-term cooler.
It needs to be well insulated. Obviously.
And it also needs to be big. The larger the cooler, the more cold it can hold.
All the coolers that have longer ratings are pretty big. The small ones just don’t hold enough ice (or whatever you’re using) to last several days.
The best long-term cooler that I’ve found is this beast right here. It’s technically rated for up to 6 days, but there are a few things we can do to extend that.
It can also be pretty easy to screw it up if you’re not careful.
For most other average coolers out there, you can expect them to keep your food cold for at most 3 days or so.
The Source of Cold
This is where most people screw up.
I guarantee you that 99% just go to the gas station, pick up a few bags of ice, then throw them into the cooler.
When it comes to long use with a cooler, these ice bags suck.
Bags of ice cubes have their place. They’re fantastic for burying beer cans to keep them at near-but-not-quite freezing temperatures.
For use in coolers, though, they just melt too fast.
The basic reason is that there’s way too much surface area on ice cubes. They let out the cold too quickly.
For playing the long game, you need massive chunks of ice. The larger the chunk, the longer it lasts.
What I like to do is freeze a couple of 1-gallon milk containers that are about 3/4 full of water. As long as you don’t overfill them, they won’t burst.
The advantage to this over just making big blocks of ice is that they don’t melt into a big, nasty soup towards the end of the trip. They’ll get wet with condensation, but you won’t have gallons of gross water in your cooler.
If you pick up that big cooler I recommended earlier, you can easily fit 6-8 of these things in there. This alone will help you keep your food cold for around a week.
One alternative to this is dry ice, if it’s available in your area. There are a few extra precautions to take when handling it, though.
For example, you should wrap it a few times in an old towel to make sure that it doesn’t directly contact anything. It can cause freeze burns to skin and can damage your equipment.
It does work really great if it’s an option. Same as with regular ice, larger chunks will last longer.
Temperature Monitoring
This is some that’s often overlooked, or done totally wrong.
To properly refrigerate food, you need to keep it at around 40 degrees. Since a week is a really long time, it’s good to keep monitoring this temperature to make sure that your food doesn’t go bad.
I’ve seen people just throw a regular thermometer in the cooler, but that’s pretty much useless. If you’re going for a long term store, you can’t open the lid and let heat in.
The best way to monitor temperatures is to get a wireless thermometer. This one will read what’s inside the cooler with its probe, and show you both this and the outside temperature on the display.
There’s a few reasons why this is worthwhile:
For one, you can make sure the cooler is still cold without having to open it up and check, which will let out all the cold it’s been storing.
The other reason is that you can make sure that your cooler isn’t in too hot of an area. The more heat it’s exposed to on the outside, the harder it is to keep the temperature down on the inside.
Protecting the Cooler From Heat
This is another really important step for making keeping your cooler cool.
If it’s hot outside, and you leave the cooler in the trunk of your 110 degree car, there is no way that it will last a week.
So there are two main elements to this:
- Keep the cooler out of direct heat, like sun.
- DON’T OPEN THE COOLER until you need it.
Since we have a lot of bears in the areas I go camping, I generally need to keep the cooler in a vehicle or another secure place.
As a workaround, I always set up a tarp to park under. This really helps to prevent the car from overheating. I also wrap the cooler in heavy blankets to add some extra insulation against the hot ambient air.
As far as I know, most of the ratings for how many days the cooler will stay cold is based on 90-degree outside temperatures. So that’s generally my goal; keep the cooler at 90 degrees or less to the extent possible.
The other point: Don’t open your cooler.
I actually bring two coolers with me. One is for short term, which I plan on using for the first 3-4 days. The big one is the long-term storage, which doesn’t get opened until day 5 or so.
This keeps the cold in. If you don’t open the lid at all, it will stay cold CONSIDERABLY longer.
Actually, if you’re regularly opening the lid throughout your trip you have literally no chance of it lasting for more than around 3 days, if that.
So a major aspect of keeping food cold is planning. Two coolers, and one is on lockdown until the last few days.
Hacks and Myths
Reading through the internet has made me stumble across a few great tips and a few that are totally wrong.
Hack: If you have a large enough deep freezer, put your entire cooler in it (with the lid off) for 24 hours before your trip. This will bring down the temperature even further before you seal it up.
Myth: Add salt to your ice blocks. Since saltwater freezes at a lower temperature, your ice will be colder.
This is not even remotely useful. Just because ice forms at a lower temperature doesn’t mean the ice is colder. Ice can be fifty degrees below zero and still be ice. Adding salt does not further decrease the temperature in any way.
Hack: Use a ratchet strap to clamp your cooler shut.
This does nothing for improving the seal. It purely serves the purpose of preventing people from accidentally opening the cooler while they’re foraging for food.
When you’re camping with family, the risk is real.
Myth: You can keep beer cold by tying a rope to it and lowering it to the bottom of the lake.
100% false. I have literally tried this in cold, 100 foot deep Canadian lakes and it does not work. It just prevents your beer from getting HOT.
Believe me, I have tried every imaginable thing to keep beer cold on camping trips. This does not work.