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I am a huge proponent preparedness and someone who believes that food security should be a primary concern of every prepper. With that being said, I focus on overall health and wellness and the role that food plays in how we can survive an emergency.
Gluten Free is a big buzz word these days and for the most part it does not mean anything more than – does not contain wheat. Usually, in the place of wheat or pasta or whatever is rice and rice is one of the most heavily Genetically Modified crops around and one of the industries that is very heavy in pesticide usage. In that light, organic becomes a huge plus. Can Wise Foods overcome that? Let’s find out.
In this blog, I compare Numanna foods to Wise Foods and try to make some sense of what the two offer.
Three Bucket System
Wise Foods offers a three bucket one-month kit with a price of $869.47 for 360 servings. It is designed to feed a family of four three servings per day. That is a really important statement because a meal is made up of servings. Their pouches contain four servings.
A serving of their Southwestern Rice and Beans offers just 180 calories. For a 2,000-calorie daily intake, each meal needs to be just over 666 calories. With one serving of Southwestern Rice and Bead, you are facing a calorie deficit for that meal of 486 calories.
So while they are offering you a great selection of foods, they are only offering you one serving per meal and claiming this is an emergency food kit for a family of four for one month. The math does not add up.
Cost per serving – $2.49 – that is NOT cost per meal.
Numanna offers a three-bucket triple family pack that contains 432 servings for $711. This is not comparing apples to apples, but Numanna offers a classic chili with 200 calories per serving. You are still facing a calorie deficit of 466 calories for this meal, but they offer extra servings. Cost per serving is $1.65. Numanna also offers food that is Soy Free, Non-GMO, without added MSG, without Aspartame, and not loaded with High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Both brands of the three bucket systems offer 25+ year shelf life. Both kits had a good selection of food choices. The price per serving is much better at Numanna than it was at Wise Foods, but Wise if very Coupon or Discount happy almost to the point of being bothersome. If you leave their site open for a minute or two you should be presented with an opportunity to save. That will help the price per serving.
Overall, I liked the idea behind Numanna and their health-minded foods. I also liked that for this product they included more servings for less money. Both brand require additional purchases to meet basic caloric intake for adults.
Overall Selection of Products
One of the key differences between Numanna and Wise Foods is that Numanna offers a complete line of organic products. I was only able to find one organic product on the Wise Food site – a 90 serving one-month supply for one person bucket.
They have a tab with “Organic and Gluten Free” but all of the products I looked at were Gluten Free and not labeled as organic. The one organic product I found was hidden away under a sub tab.
Both brands offer a great selection of products. One difference between the two is that if you want to just add a bucket of freeze-dried chicken or beef to your supply it becomes difficult. At Wise Food their meat buckets contain some freeze-dried chicken – all flavored.
But the beef that is not already in beef stroganoff or cheesy beef is their three pouches of roast beef. There was not an option for just a bucket of freeze-dried beef. At Numanna, you can buy a bucked of 36 servings of just freeze-dried hamburger. The Wise Food meat bucket included Stroganoff Beef, Cheesy Beef, and Roast Beef.
It also was kind of disheartening to see that at Wise Food every bucket of meet contained X number of servings of rice. It is much simpler to build a quality emergency food plan and menu without all of the added foods. If you want to just buy a bucket of meat at Wise Foods, you have to also buy all the servings of rice.
One of the plusses at Wise Food is their supply of outdoor living products – products that are designed for those who like to wander the paths less traveled. They offer a couple of options for grab and go type backpacks with X number of days of food. You can find the individual piece for these at Numanna but not in a kit.
In short, there are some differences but the selection here is pretty evenly matched with that being said the differences are not always clear. For example serving size differs between brands and you have to watch the calorie value per serving at both places.
Overall Meal Nutrition
In this section I compare a couple of food types. Keep in mind that we are not comparing apples to apples as neither brand has exact duplicates of products. For example, at Wise Foods you can buy roasted chicken and at Numanna you can buy freeze-dried diced chicken.
Another thing to pay close attention to is the serving size by weight. They are not always the same.
Wise Roasted Chicken
- Serving size is 11 grams
- Calories – 50 per serving
- Fat – none
- Protein – 9 grams
- Sodium – 85 mg
- Cholesterol – 20 mg
- Contains 4 percent of your RDA for Vitamin C.
Numanna Freeze-dried Chicken Breast
- Serving size is 28 grams
- Calories – 130 per serving
- Fat – 1 gram
- Protein – 25 grams
- Sodium – 30 mg
- Cholesterol – 55 mg
- Contains 2 percent of your RDA for Vitamin A.
- Contains 6 percent of your RDA for Iron
The Results: The Wise serving size is much smaller for their Roast Chicken at 11 g per serving in comparison to the Numanna Diced Chicken. Even still, the larger serving size offers 16 grams of added protein, and less sodium.
You also gain 80 additional calories with the Numanna chicken. What that breaks down to is 4.64 grams of protein per gram of chicken at Numanna and 4.54 grams of protein per gram of chicken at Wise Foods.
There is less salt in the Numanna chicken than the chicken you buy at Wise Foods. I would give you the price per serving, but Wise Foods mixes in servings of rice into their bucket and some of the food is not just chicken it is already prepared such as beef Stroganoff.
Wise 240 Servings of Long-Term Milk
- Cost per Serving – $0.75/Serving = 179.98/240
- Serving size is 2-TableSpoons
- Calories – 80 per serving
- Fat – 3 grams
- Protein – 2 grams
- Sodium – 90 mg
- Total Carb – 10 grams
- Cholesterol – Zero mg
- Contains 30 percent of your RDA for Calcium.
Numanna – 6 Pack of Hormone-Free USDA Non-Fat Milk Powder 40 Serving Pouch
- Cost per serving $0.44/serving = 105.75/240
- Serving size is ¼ cup or 27 grams
- Calories – 100 per serving
- Fat – 0 gram
- Protein – 9 grams
- Sodium – 100 mg
- Total Carbs – 14 grams
- Cholesterol – 5 mg
The Results
In this comparison we are comparing apples to apples and the clear winner on any levels is Numanna. First, the serving size is much larger at Numanna than at Wise Foods. Wise offers you a serving size of just two tablespoons and Numanna offers you ¼ of a cup of milk.
How much dry cereal can you enjoy with two tablespoons of milk? Another way that NuManna advances is in the cost per serving. $.044 cents over at NuManna and $0.75 at Wise Foods and the volume is twice at NuManna than at Wise Foods. Plus, NuManna is offering hormone free, GMO free milk.
One of the biggest eye openers that I hope readers will pay attention too was the difference in serving sizes between similar products at different companies. There was also the “idea” that you are buying a supply of food for X amount of time, but the calories do not add up to a complete meal.
What that means is that a one-month supply of food is not really a “supply of food” but three servings per day. You will have to add to those servings to meet your basic caloric intake goals and if you do not realize that then you are going to be short of food in an emergency.
If we were to look at Wise Foods and NuManna Foods and ask they question, which set of products is better for me in terms of health and wellness, then there is a clear winner – NuManna. For those of us who think about food security, NuManna just makes a lot of sense.
The whole organic option is big on my bucket list and the fact that they think about and sell non-GMO foods is another plus. For me, it goes back to whether or not I can survive an emergency situation from a health point of view. Companies that support that agenda are a plus in my book.
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7 Responses to “Numanna vs Wise Foods Compared”
Thank you for an encietful and useful comparison! Numanna is great in offering the organic non GMOs I’ve been looking for!
All of NuManna’s entrees contain massive amounts of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which contains large amounts of excitotoxins such as glutamate and aspartate.
It’s founder badmouths Amazon while selling the NuManna on Amazon.
This is patriotism for profit, which puts profits before everything else.
Those are awful ingredients. Have you found an emergency food company that doesn’t have unhealthy ingredients?
Organic, shmorganic, at the end of your days will it matter?
I think the best way to compare is the cost per calorie and what the calories are derived from. I’m vegetarian but come shtf I will eat anything.
Thanks for all your efforts, hard enough to find real info on all the prep foods.
Terry
Thanks for the clear and concise review and comparisons. I am allergic to wheat. So this was wonderfully helpful!
Thank you for talking food quality rather than just quantity! NuManna is on my radar, now.