Back Country Cuisine uses nitrogen-flushing heavy duty foil laminate pouches to keep the food safe and flavour-some without the need for preservatives. The safekeeping of your food is taken a step further by adding another layer of security placing these single serving pouches into compact, 18L sealed buckets. The buckets keep out dust, moisture, rodents, insects, light and preventing damage to pouches thus assuring your food supply is not compromised during storage. Back Country Cuisine provides a 3 year best before on all pouches, please refer to individual packets. Recent testing has shown that the meals are safe to eat well beyond 6 years given they are kept cool and dry.The square buckets are very easy to stack and store. If you are placed in an emergency situation these buckets can also serve several other purposes, such as water collection, digging, carrying tools and more.