Buying dehydrated trek food in Chile/Santiago

Hey, Canadian, how are ya doing'?
Basically , because it is not made in a factory and not "packaged" you could have a program,but pouched are probably okay.. For someone who has gone thru their website and procedure at the border, I can tell you it is not too clear, and may or may not cause problems.Your best strategy is to declare it andsee what they say.:) However, pouches will probably be okay, regarrdless of what, but declare them and be sure if you are at the border. Often depends on the border aduanas agent. Smile at them..

I have never heard of somewhere here which sells dehydrated food for excursions, but there are a few dehydrated products available in major supermarkets. The obvious soups, but also mashed potato for one (flavoured and plain), rice for one or more (idem), even dried beans in individual servings. It would help augment your supplies and you could transfer the contents to ziploc bags, also available.

Food

You can buy some dehydrated pasta plus sauce mixes.

As people above me mentioned, it is probably hard to find. Chile tends to have a bit better infrastructure for trekking than Brazil, but it is not Europe/US.

Looking online, I found this: http://www.lacumbreonline.cl/equipo-de-montana/cocina/nutricion/wise-comia-liofilizada-con-carne.html They have shops in Santiago, Puerto Natales and Punta Arenas, pretty much your main hubs if you plan on trekking in Chile.

That is pretty much what you're looking for, right?

The problem is that if I look at the website for my local (Brazil) mountain equipment store, they also have some options on their website, but the physical store does not carry it (here, but it's a chain, so maybe in some of the other stores they do have it). What I tend to do is just make up my own menu. You can get various different instant pasta meals, flavoured rice, mashed potatoes and soups at the supermarket. I then add in some fresh onions and carrots for the first 2 or 3 days, and maybe some canned fish, spam, corned beef, etc. Dried fruit is also easy to find here (presumably also in Chile, but not sure).
My main problem here is a bread replacement. In Europe I could find some pretty good hardtack that worked great, but I have not found anything similar here anywhere.

La Cumbre is a possibility but at $7,900 a portion it is really expensive. A lot can be found in a large supermarket. As Willemspie said, there are lots of different quick prepare pastas and Martini brand has quick cooking pulses with flavourings.

Hi all, thanks for all the helpful information! I looked at the La Cumbre website and they do have a few interesting options for dehydrated food. Andrewk81 you have an interesting comment that it does not mean that this food is actually available in the store, which can indeed be the case. I was in Chile a couple of years ago and remember going in a similar store in Punta Arenas, I wish I would have looked for it then! Maybe I'll try to bring a few pouches with me, and then complement with locally-bought stuff. Thanks again :-)

We brought our own freeze dry food (commercially packaged) from the US into Chile. Of course, we declared everything at customs and told them what kinds of flavors we brought. According to Chilean customs regulations that we downloaded, these types of trekking/backpacking foods are ok as long as they are commercially sealed.

More specifically, we brought many flavors of Mountain House freeze dry packages, including teriyaki chicken and rice, turkey tetrazini, meat lasagna, etc. The meat is also fine in this form.

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