Fairbanks inventors patent an ultra-light meal for the backcountry

A Fairbanks company called Industria Imperium has patented a powdered meal you mix in a cup of water — engineered to pack a full meal's worth of calories into something that weighs almost nothing. The four inventors behind it have spent years figuring out exactly how much fuel it takes to survive an Alaska backcountry hunt.

The idea answers a problem anyone who has hauled a pack into the Brooks Range knows — you burn far more than you can realistically carry. On a remote Alaska hunt, a person can torch well over 4,000 calories a day, but food that heavy and bulky doesn't fit in a pack that also has to carry a tent, a rifle and, eventually, meat. So hunters lose weight in the field. The patented formula — a blend of carbohydrates, fats and amino acids that dissolves in about five ounces of water — is built to deliver a complete meal's calories, roughly 670 to 830 per serving, without the load.

The inventors are an unusual mix of lab scientists and backcountry veterans. Robert "Trey" Coker and Melynda Coker are exercise physiologists who study how the body handles extreme metabolic stress; both have worked at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and now at the University of Montana's Center for Work Physiology and Exercise Metabolism. To understand what soldiers actually endure, the two went through a seven-week Army Ranger School immersion themselves.

They are joined by Brent Ruby, who directs that Montana center and whose research specialty is the "extreme occupational athletes" — wildland firefighters and military operators — who work to exhaustion for days at a stretch. Ruby is nationally known in the field, including for a memorable study finding that fast food refuels muscles about as well as sports supplements do.

The fourth name is the most Alaskan of all. Larry Bartlett of Fairbanks is a combat veteran and the owner of Pristine Ventures, a backcountry hunting and packrafting outfit, and one of the state's better-known do-it-yourself hunt planners. He has spent 25 years on the science of getting wild meat out of the bush intact, taught Arctic survival at UAF — which awarded him an honorary doctorate — and brings the field knowledge the scientists' data describes.

Their work grew out of research that reads like an Alaska adventure log. The team measured energy expenditure on multi-day expeditionary hunts in the uninhabited Brooks Range, where participants ran a steep calorie deficit yet held on to muscle, and on the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic, a self-supported race across the same mountains north of the Arctic Circle. The formula turns those numbers into a recipe.

The patent describes its intended users plainly — a "special operator, adventure enthusiast, ultra-endurance athlete, or the like," the kind of people who, like its inventors, spend a lot of time a long way from the nearest road.