Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has made good on his longtime dream to purvey food, and it’s no surprise that his recently minted Patagonia Provisions offers healthy, sustainably sourced snacks and meals. The brand, headquartered in Sausalito, debuted in 2013 with lightly smoked wild sockeye salmon. Earlier this year, organic fruit-and-almond bars hit the shelves. Rounding out the menu is Tsampa Soup, Chouinard’s play on a roasted-grain staple he discovered 35 years ago while mountaineering in the Himalayas.
Loaded with grains and dehydrated veggies and portabello mushrooms, the soup is sold as both a home-cooked comfort food and an ideal backcountry power fuel. Commenting on the latter, Carpinteria’s Pat White, who’s training with the Los Padres Forest Association Volunteer Wilderness Rangers, said that considering the serving size and calorie count, he “was surprised at how hearty this meal was.”
“I would take it on a backpacking trip for its nutritional content,” White added. “A big advantage is that you could put it in a small Ziploc, taking up basically zero space, and just mix it with extra vegetables, dehydrated mash potatoes, or beans. This soup is a perfect base, and I was very impressed with the seasoning. You can actually appreciate it at the end of a long day, instead of just shoving calories in your mouth.”
Like all of Patagonia’s goods, its foods have to live up to the company’s high environmental standards. For the soup, that means it’s made only with certified-organic, non-GMO ingredients.
“We’re taking all our resources and going all the way back to the ground and cleaning up our entire supply chain,” Chouinard said, “so that when somebody buys a product from us, they know we’re doing as much as we possibly can to make it as responsibly as possible.”