Ceiba Food Pack & Menus
Packing food and ice for any long river trip is a science. Ceiba will provide your trip wholesome, tasty food in plentiful quantities. Our menus can easily accommodate vegetarians, those with special dietary needs or allergies, and occasions such as birthdays and holidays. No detail is too small. Whether we pack the food into Ceiba’s coolers & boxes or utilize your own, we will organize it to stay as fresh as possible.
Whatever your needs, we have you covered!
Menu Options
You have several choices when working with Ceiba and designing your preferred menu. Choose the easy and simple route of picking from a Ceiba Standard Menu, or choose to work closely with our food pack guru and put together a Customized Menu. We always include the necessary staples and condiments to prepare your meals, a full snack box, spice kit, plenty of fresh fruit and tasty veggies, fresh locally roasted coffee, tea, juice and drink mixes.
Ceiba Standard Menus
Ceiba offers a variety of set menus to make the food planning process simple and stress-free.
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Any menu can be shortened or lengthened for your trip.
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Talk to us about supplementing any menu for vegetarians and specific food allergies!
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We can add premade dinner entrees in boilbags to any menu for a small fee – just ask!
Choose from these set menus for good healthy eating!
18 day
Light on Meat
This menu has no red meat, although it does include a few breakfast meats for the serious carnivores among us! We can easily turn this into a more vegetarian menu or accommodate vegetarians with an alternative at any given meal.
18 day
Summer Classic #1
This is a pretty classic set of meals for the Grand Canyon with plenty of pack lunch options, and a few more cold, easy breakfasts for the hot summer trips.
18 day
Summer Classic #2
This menu has a little more lunch variety, and is just the classic set of river running meals. A little dutch oven work, some grilling and a mix of hot and cold breakfasts.
18 day
Ready Made
This menu is easy and still yummy. The entrees are homemade meals by a local chef in boilbags, so you heat them, open and serve. All you need to prepare are the sides. This menu tries to minimize time spent on preparation and maximize your time to do other things!
21 day
BBQ Extravaganza
This menu will satisfy that need to grill. It must stem from the classic "girls grill golden porkchops" photo in the original Belknap river guide.
21 day
Good Eatin'
This menu made the group happy! A pretty straight forward one. A few grill nites, nothing too laborious for dinner, some variety, and plain old good eatin'!!
21 day
Guides Choice
It was Grand Canyon guides who designed this menu. They knew they wanted to eat well and knew the things they never wanted to eat after working all summer on the river.
21 day
I Wanna Hike
This menu is great for not spending too much time in the kitchen. No dutch oven meals, lots of deli spread lunches make it easy to just do pack lunches, and a majority easy breakfasts for a quick get away.
24 day
Belly Full
This menu is varied and portions are beefed up for the cold winter trips. We can add on or subtract days to fit your long, cold, winter time adventure.
24 day
Winter Time
This menu is varied and portions are beefed up for the cold winter trips. We can add on or subtract days to fit your long, cold, winter time adventure.
Menu Planning
Once you have committed to doing a food pack thru Ceiba we will start the planning at about 10 to 12 weeks prior to your launch. Our food guru will send out 2 emails with links to our handy google food preference forms. This will allow you to easily collect information from the entire group by sending out the link to your particiapnts. A spreadsheet will be automatically populated with all of their dietary information. Once you have decided on a specific menu to base from we will move forward from there!
Customized Menu
With our customized Menu plan we work with you and your group to fine-tune a menu of your desire. You choose from the many options of breakfast, lunch, hors d’oeuvres, dinner and dessert. If you have your own recipe for Grandma’s special “dutch oven delight” we can easily add that in. With our experience of how food lasts we will arrange your menu and send you an overview to approve. From here we can finalize the details and give you a per person/per day cost. Menu options must be submitted 60 days before your launch.
A Few Thoughts!
You already know that you will probably eat better on your canyon trip than you ever do at home. How often do you actually eat 3 square meals a day at home? Is it likely that at home you will eat leftovers at least twice a week? Welcome to our Grand restaurant where all of our menus have healthy, wholesome ingredients that will keep you well fed, creative and never going hungry!
Breakfasts – Although lots of huge, hot breakfasts sound exciting, we find most people really don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen preparing breakfast. They’d rather be drinking Toucanet coffee, looking at the view or getting a head start on rigging their boat for the day! Having a handful of just cold & hot cereal mornings is an easy fix!
Lunches – Variety is nice, but if you want to do a lot of hiking it is convenient to be able to have a pack lunch. Some trips just pull out the lunch stuff at breakfast and have everyone pack their own lunch. The beauty of a pack lunch is that you can eat whenever you want! This saves time of not having to do the entire lunch set up midday.
Some of our lunches require a little prep the morning of, for example: hummus & tabouli, pasta salad, hardboiled eggs. A few need a bowl at lunch, like tuna, chicken or salmon salad, veggie and caesar wraps. The 20 mil lunch box has all the condiments you need and usually all the lunch items are in one cooler for ease of finding things. It’s always good to look at the lunch menu during breakfast to make sure everything you need will be accessible when you stop for lunch, such as apples, oranges, lemons, limes, special ingredients for that lunch. I challenge you to eat all your fruit! Slicing up apples & oranges with lunch will encourage eating, or take a whole piece for a hike!
Snack Box – Heaven forbid you forget that the snack box exists! These are for anytime, anyplace! Add some things from the snacks box to spice up your pack lunch or grab a bite if you need a little sugar rush before running Hance Rapid! (In the summer time the chocolates are usually hiding in the lunch cooler!) Your goal is to eat it all! Whoever ends up with this box on their boat will either be really popular or really full.
Dinners – There are suggestions with each meal on how to prepare the food. But on the other hand, if you are a whiz in the kitchen feel free to be creative. Don’t be shy with those spices. Keep an eye on your produce. If something is ripe and needs to be used, by all means use it. Don’t wait for it to rot so you can throw it away. You won’t starve down the way, I promise!
Use your leftovers! – Toasted bagels or english muffins leftover from breakfast give great variety at lunch or provide a good mid morning snack. If breakfast doesn’t call for bagels but you know you have extras from a previous meal, pull them out!!! If your boat with lunch bread flips and gets soggy think about enforcing the open face sandwich rule, or use tortillas. We rarely see a trip that uses every single tortilla.
Kitchen Sundries & Toilet Supplies – Full trip kitchen sundries & full trip toilet supplies are included with our Whole Shabang food pack.
If your food pack is not part of a Whole Shabang package, sundries are as follows:
• A Ceiba food pack AND a complete Ceiba kitchen rental – includes full trip kitchen sundries.
• A Ceiba food pack AND a complete Ceiba toilet rental – includes full trip toilet supplies.
Boatmen! – You are responsible for knowing what is on your boat! Keep your cooler neat and drained. Check your milk crates with fruit & veggies to make sure they are in good shape. Pull out anything that is going bad so it doesn’t affect everything else.
Please feel free to call us with any questions about any food menus or issues! In addition to this cost is the service fee for planning/shopping/packing your food. Please call for details.
