Walking Equipment and Accessories

Light My Fire MealKit BIO | Review

A handy lunch box kit made from innovative eco materials

Why We Chose The Light My Fire Mealkit BIO: Versatile, portable, sustainable

Price: £30
Weight: 400g
More info: lightmyfire.com

Plastic has become a dirty word. Despite being heralded as the material of the future in the early part of the twentieth century, it is now vilified as a global scourge, polluter of the earth and oceans. But as Scandinavian brand Light My Fire points out, it is more complicated than that. After all, a lot of confusion still abounds about plastic and its constituent materials.

Many brands have recently turned to biodegradable plastics for their products, which are compostable and therefore break down naturally in the environment. Sounds great, right? Well, yes, and in some cases they are, but unfortunately some biodegradable plastics are still derived from fossil fuels, namely crude oil, and they can also only be composted in specialist industrial facilities. If they end up in normal landfill sites, or even if you put them in your garden compost bin, they could still take centuries to break down, and as such these plastics still carry negative environmental impacts.

That’s why Light My Fire have turned to biobased plastics for products like their Mealkit. The parts are formed from organic materials – for example, the spork is made from GMO-free corn based bioplastics, the cup is made from certified sugarcane based bioplastic, and the other bits are made from bioplastics derived from certified sugarcane and wood fibre. The biomass content in the plastic is completely carbon neutral. It’s a greener solution to the plastic problem.

It has also resulted in a handy all-in-one meal kit that packs away neatly, with typically thoughtful and well-engineered Scandinavian precision. The multi-purpose kit includes a lid/plate, a bowl, two waterproof storage boxes with tightly-fitting lids, a cup, a cutting board/strainer and the ubiquitous outdoors utensil that is the mighty Spork. All the vessels have graduated lines to help when measuring out ingredients. It comes with a little strap to hold everything together and stop it rattling around in your rucksack, and a bag to carry it all in. Basically, when combined with a stove and a pot it would be all you needed for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the great outdoors. All components are dishwasher and microwave safe, and the biobased plastics are 100% BPA-free too.

Outdoorsy types who generally use a battered mess tin, an old spoon and a penknife might find all this a bit fussy and over-engineered, and if we’re being critical, with so many bits it would be easy to lose one or two things in the field. But we can’t fault the eco-friendly approach, and if more people around your office brought their lunch to work in one of these kits, rather than plumping for a Tesco meal deal every day, the world would undoubtedly be a better place.

Tester’s Verdict

Will Renwick, Outdoors Magic Editor

“You’ve got to admire Light My Fire for their efforts here. They’ve recognised the environmental issues surrounding their products and the company as a whole and addressed them.

“When I first received this lunchbox set for testing I couldn’t see or feel any difference between it and the previous fully plastic version. You’ve got to look really close to notice it. The only real telling sign is if you, say, scratch it with a fingernail, you can sense it’s a little easier to make an impression.

“If you’re worried about this composting in your kitchen, have no fear. I left this, and I’m afraid this is no exaggeration, at the back of my fridge full of manchego and stilton cheese for four months and it didn’t collapse into some pulpy mess. The cheese did though.

“One downside, and it was probably all down to my own misuse, but the strap that holds the set together snapped the first time I used this. Fortunately, the lid fits nice and tight so it will actually just hold itself together.

“Oh, big fan of the cutting board/strainer by the way. It’s the kind of thing for camp cooking that I hadn’t realised I actually really needed and I take it on all my wild camping trips now.”

Trade Secrets

Calill Odqvist Jagusch, CEO of Light My Fire

“One of the unusual things we found about working with bioplastics, is that you can actually smell the source material with some of the materials. So for instance, when you get a new MealKit, because our food containers use a bioplastic derived from sugar cane and wood fibre you’ll find that you can actually detect a nice faint woody smell coming from them. At least until you’ve used and washed them a few times!”