Ration packs are perhaps one of first things that spring to mind when we think of food in the military. But have you ever stopped to consider how they're developed? From their weight to their ability to be dropped from high altitutudes and withstand boiling and freezing climates, the science behind ration packs is incredibly complex.
Ross Coad spent more than three decades working at the Defence Science and Technology Group in Scottsdale, Tasmania. This involved research on food packaging, food processing, the nutritional requirements of military personnel and, of course, ration packs.
Listen as he uncovers the best (and worse) ration pack items, and how they were trialled in the field.
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: When you think of food in the military, what’s the first thing you think of? Is it Bully Beef? Spam? Food that doesn’t look or taste like food, but does the job? For me, my mind instantly goes to ration packs – you know, like the ones in the movies where you just add water. But I’ve never stopped to consider the thought that goes into developing ration packs, from the balance of nutrients to the packaging they’re delivered in. Luckily, I’m joined today by someone who has, and that is Ross Coad.
Ross spent more than three decades working at the Defence Science and Technology Group in Scottsdale Tasmania. In essence, this involved giving the military advice on research, science and technology in the food space, and in practice, he was looking at things like food packaging, food processing, the nutritional requirements of military personnel and, of course, ration packs.
Ross joins me now to unpack some of the science behind military food and shed a bit more light on his career. Welcome Ross…
ROSS COAD: No problem, Laura, pleased to be here.
LAURA THOMAS: Now, As I mentioned Ross, my knowledge of military food and in particular, ration packs is limited to a Hollywood portrayal. So, I was hoping you could talk us through the evolution of the ration pack, so what it used to look like and what it looks like now.
ROSS COAD: Yeah, I suppose the first thing to say is that most military personnel are not eating ration packs. They're generally eat in the military mess, or they may be off base these days, so ration packs are important, and people instantly seem to think of ration packs when they talk about defence feeding. I suppose that's because it's a distinctly military approach to feeding, and for those who do need to consume ration packs, it's very important to ensure that they're fit for purpose. So, the purpose of a ration pack is to provide sufficient food to feed a soldier for a day. So that basic requirement hasn't changed over the years, but there has certainly been some changes in the types of food provided. They also need to meet nutritional requirements, food safety standards. They need to have a long shelf life, because they're going to be stored and be manufactured, stored and then issued as needed. They need to be robust, tough, because of the nature of the environment, either before they're issued or even after, they need to be able to be dropped out of a plane, for example, on a pallet. They need to be easily stored and transported, but most importantly, of course, they need to be convenient for a soldier to use in the field.
ROSS COAD: So, the main changes since the first Australian designed ration pack was introduced way back in 1943 have been in the types of food, the packaging, the energy content and the range of foods. These changes have really come about mainly through developments in food processing and through changes in packaging technologies. So, during the 1960s Scottsdale's research into food dehydration was to reduce weight and to extend the shelf life of foods used by military personnel in the field. So that research turned to freeze drying. Now, even though, at that stage, we were researching freeze drying for military purposes, it's actually a very old technique. The Incas of South America used freeze drying to preserve potatoes and meat. They had freezing cold nights to freeze food and sunny days to dehydrate frozen food. So, they go through repeated cycles of freezing and drying, freezing and drying, and eventually they would end up with a product that would keep for years, if necessary. You can think of this as a perhaps a deliberate case of severe freezer burn. If you put something in a freezer and you know the packaging doesn't seal well, then the product will dry out. So, this was basically the technique the Incas used, and it's the process behind all freeze drying. So, by the early 1970s Scottsdale was running a high-performance freeze dryer. And by about 1975 a lightweight patrol ration pack was introduced into service. So, this remained in service for the next 45 years. So, prior to the 1970sthere were no freeze-dried products in ration packs. That was one new introduction.
LAURA THOMAS: What kind of foods were you freeze drying?
ROSS COAD: Well, we freeze dried mostly main meal items. So, if you think of a casserole type meal of various types, that was the type of product that we froze. So that replaced the canned meat-based meals that were already in ration packs, but they had much lower energy content and were nowhere near the freeze-dried meals in overall quality. I think you might have mentioned bully beef or spam. So, freeze dried meal was a considerable improvement, as you can imagine, on that. Freeze dried meals didn't occur in all the ration packs, they only went in the lightweight ration pack, which for most of the time, I think, was probably, you know, maybe 10 to 15 per cent of ration packs. The rest still used canned meals. So, you know, if you've ever gone Bush walking and you've got a can of something in your backpack, it's always uncomfortable. No matter where you put it, it pokes into your back. You know, cans are relatively heavy, so research between industry and defence in the United States led to the development of the flexible retort pouch, and in the early 2000s in Australia, the canned meals in our ration packs were replaced by larger meals in flexible retort pouches. So, these are pouches made of plastic and aluminium foil laminated together, and you'll see these now quite commonly in the supermarket. It took a while, but over time, they've become quite common. So, they're probably familiar to everyone, even if they're not aware of the origins.
LAURA THOMAS: So, is that quite common that a lot of development in the defence space would lead to development within the popular supermarket space, like you said, we might not notice where these developments are coming from?
ROSS COAD: Yes, it is. And I think, I think that is applicable generally across defence, that there's nothing like a military imperative to spur research in a whole range of fields. And over time, you know, I suppose once the military emergency is over, the factories are there producing these military products, and it's a relatively small move to then modify them slightly for civilian use. So that happens quite commonly, I think. In the food space, this goes way back to 1795, for example, when Napoleon, he offered 12,000 francs as an incentive for someone to invent an improved food preservation process, because obviously, he was finding that the shelf life of foods in the field in military conquests was insufficient. So, it took a while, but 15 years later, Nicholas Appert claimed the prize for his canning process, and that's the canning process that has stayed with us until today. The world of food processing storage has never been the same, it's really kicked off a whole new way of looking at food preservation.
LAURA THOMAS: I'm assuming that you've taste tested a lot of ration pack items. What are your favourites, and perhaps some least favourite items that were available.
ROSS COAD: I've taste tested more ration pack items than I care to remember. Some of the main meals, the ones in flexible retort pouches, some of them were terrible. I mean, really terrible. I couldn't believe they were in ration packs at all. That was one of the comments I wrote down. I remember writing that down a few times because we were able to provide comments as well as our ratings. And I said words to the effect of, 'I cannot believe this is in a ration pack'. They were that bad, and then they got worse on storage. So, they started out really bad, and they just got worse. They were the worst. Freeze dried meals. Freeze Dried main meals, they were really good, and they were super stable in storage. We placed a shelf life on them of three years, and that was only because we were required to place a shelf life. They actually stable for much longer than that. I thought some of the minor items in the ration pack were good. Some of the biscuits were particularly good, one of the long-standing favourites, not just of mine, but of many, was the jam biscuit. So, it was two layers of biscuit with a raspberry jam or strawberry jam filling, and that was popular for many people over many years.
LAURA THOMAS: Now, you mentioned this before, Ross and I just wanted to circle back on it, that there are different types of ration packs. So, what are they?
ROSS COAD: Well, there's been a change just recently which I haven't been involved in because I've retired. So, I'll speak perhaps about the ration packs that were in place, perhaps up until, well, up until last year, I suspect. So, there were three main types of ration packs. There was a lightweight ration pack, there was a general-purpose ration pack, and those two were intended to feed one person for one day. Then there was also a group feeder ration pack. When I started work in Scottsdale, that was a 10-person group feeder. So, it was a big box containing sufficient food to feed 10 people for a day, that was eventually changed to become a group feeder to feed five people for a day. So, you had individual ration packs and group feeder ration packs. Now I did mention, accidentally, I said individual meals then, sorry, in the back of my mind, I had a ration in mind, called the individual meal Combat ration. So that was in place, look, I'm not sure when that went out. That might have gone out in the early 2000s or the late 1990s and that was, as it says, just an individual meal, so that would be quite a useful ration pack. And I don't know why that one went out of service, because quite often, soldiers in training will be living in barracks. They'll go have breakfast at the mess, then they'll go out for the day, have a ration pack issued to them in the field for the day, but then they'll come back and eat at the mess in the evening. So why the individual meal combat ration went out of service, I really don't know. But it seems that there is a place for it, and I don't know, maybe one day we'll have a resurgence.
LAURA THOMAS: When you're developing these different types of ration packs, you've kind of mentioned the nutritional value and the weight of them. I was hoping we could delve a little bit more into that and talk about some of those key considerations for ration packs in a little bit more detail.
ROSS COAD: Generally speaking, foods within ration packs are commercially available items, although they may be packaged differently to gain and improve shelf life. It's more economical if you can use commercially available products. They weren't always commercially available. For example, there was the ration chocolate, which is pretty well known, I think, and that product was designed specifically for defence. It was developed in collaboration with Cadbury's, well known chocolate manufacturer, way back in the mid-1960s. So that would be included in ration packs, or was designed for ration packs in climates that would simply reduce normal, standard commercial chocolate to a runny mess. So, this ration chocolate, technically, it melts, but it doesn't run, so it will soften, but it doesn't flow. That means that even though you have something that has been affected by the heat and softens, it doesn't actually flow. So, when you eat it, it's not like eating something that won't dissolve in your mouth and won't melt in your mouth, you still get a chocolate sensation without the mess.
LAURA THOMAS: And does it taste as good as regular chocolate?
ROSS COAD: There are differing views on that. The ration chocolate was fortified with vitamins, and some of the vitamins added a slightly medicinal taste to the chocolate. So, some people didn't like that. I didn't mind it. So, it really came down to personal preference. But certainly, at the time it was introduced, and for many years, it was a very popular item.
LAURA THOMAS: What other things were you working on Ross?
ROSS COAD: There's a part of Defence called the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, and basically their job is to buy stuff for Defence, and they actually make the decisions about what gets changed in a ration pack, but we provide advice to inform those decisions. Sometimes we were actually tasked to design new ration packs for specific purposes. So, these included a lightweight, energy dense ration pack, a hot climate ration pack, and modularized ration pack. So, it was interesting, what we found with these special purpose ration packs was that none were introduced into service in their entirety as new ration packs. However, the results were used to introduce improvements to the existing ration pack. So, the best elements were picked up and used.
ROSS COAD: If I use the hot climate ration pack as an example, the purpose of that was to improve consumption of ration packs in the hot climate. So, whether ration items are eaten depends on many things, including the climate. So, in a cold climate, certain foods are going to be preferred over others. Similarly, in a hot climate, we know this from our own personal experience. So as a result of this work, items that were more acceptable in a hot climate, such as beef jerky, were actually introduced into general purpose ration pack, which is commonly used in hot climates because it's designed for Australian conditions. But getting soldiers to eat ration packs has long been a bit of problem, and it's not just Australian soldiers or Australian ration packs. It's a near, nearly a universal problem when feeding soldiers on ration packs. So given the opportunity, most soldiers will strip their ration packs at the beginning of a training activity. If they're issued with, say, three or four days of ration packs, they'll strip them down to what they think they're going to eat over those three or four days. So, this potentially creates a problem. If they take too much out, they're going to be fatigued early. They're not going to have enough food. If they leave too much in, then they're carrying around food that they're just going to bring back to base at the end of the activity. So, they’re unnecessary load carriage. So how do they get that right? Well, really, it just comes down to experience. An experienced soldier will have a pretty good idea of what they're going to eat and what they're not going to eat, whereas perhaps someone who's relatively new might have some difficulty there.
LAURA THOMAS: So, correct me if I'm wrong here, the ration packs that soldiers are given, they're not expected to take every item out with them?
ROSS COAD: Well, ration packs are designed to meet a certain energy expenditure level. Based on research conducted in the 1980s it became clear that the typical energy expenditure of a soldier was around 16 megajoules per day. It made sense then that a ration pack should provide that amount of energy, but at that time, in the mid-1980s it didn't. It only provided about 12 and a half megajoules of energy, well below the typical energy expenditure of a soldier. It's probably more typical of a normal civilian going about their day-to-day business, perhaps with a bit of exercise thrown in, I suppose, probably in the range 10 to 12 megajoules would be the average civilian energy expenditure for an active person. So anyway, it took a while, but by the mid-1990s they managed to get a ration pack up to 13 and a half megajoules. They were slowly getting there, and then by about 2000 we managed to get it up to 16 megajoules. But for some reason, it kept going up. So, there were some changes in the way ration packs were contracted and designed, and we ended up with almost 19 megajoules by the time we got to 2012, so this was way above what most soldiers needed. The highest energy expenditures I recall us recording, were up around 26 megajoules per day, which is really, really high. That was by Special Forces soldiers in training. But anyway, 19 megajoules of energy being provided by ration pack is much more than was needed, and so that needed to be scaled back a bit while still retaining choice and perhaps a little bit of extra energy, but not way up at 19, something a bit closer to 16, perhaps around about 17 megajoules.
LAURA THOMAS: And you've alluded to this a bit already, because it's one thing to develop these ration packs and have them in a controlled environment, but it's another to test them. And as part of your work, you actually went on some field trials to do this. So, tell me a little bit about those.
ROSS COAD: Yes, well, being involved in field trials is so different to being in our normal working environment. Scientists normally work in a nice, clean, comfortable, temperature control building, and in our case, that was in Tasmania and usually engaged in a combination of computer-based work and laboratory-based work. And then you go on a field trial, and you find yourself at a training range in northern Queensland, undertaking a field trial. Now suddenly, the physical demands and distractions and discomfort go up considerably. You know, I found myself wondering at times, 'Why on earth is there a training range in Tully, of all places, where it rains like nothing else?'. Just the physical change from our normal working environment was quite significant. But having said that, field trials were really seen as such a great opportunity to get valuable experience in the field with soldiers. We could observe, see what they do. We could ask questions. We could get that military context through immersion in a way. It's one thing to listen to an officer tell you what it's like, but when you go into the field and you can actually see the way soldiers use ration packs, the physical environment in which they're working, the mud, in many cases, especially in Tully, and the role that food plays in their morale as well as their physical performance. So that means that, you know, field trials are quite a special and important opportunity for researchers.
LAURA THOMAS: What was the role that the food played in morale?
ROSS COAD: There's a saying about 'soldiers will always complain about their boots and they'll always complain about their food'. There's no doubt that food was an important factor in in morale. You know, although tastes would vary among soldiers, there were certain foods which were recognised as having an uplifting, morale boosting character. So main meal items are particularly important. There's an expression around that goes something like 'at the end of the day, a soldier may not have much to look forward to, so let's at least give them decent food'. Freeze dried meals were very good in that respect. They were very palatable, very filling, easily reconstituted, and soldiers really enjoyed them. But as I said that that only went to maybe 10 per cent of soldiers at any one time. So, the retort pouch meals, it was important that they were good as a morale booster. But then, of course, soldiers also had snacks during the day, and so you need a combination of muesli bars and so on, which taste good, which they enjoy eating. But of course, you have to balance that with actually meeting their need for nutritional intake. It can't all be about morale. Sometimes we have to eat things that are good for us but don't necessarily boost our morale hugely.
LAURA THOMAS: And how do you do that?
ROSS COAD: It's important that military personnel have a good diet so and as I mentioned before, most of the time they're eating in a military mess or eating at home if they live off base, so the amount of time they actually are solely dependent on food provided by defence is relatively short for most of them. However, when they're on ration packs, we want them to eat enough of the ration pack to meet their dietary requirements. So, as I alluded to before, it's important that they taste good, but the ration pack may have been on storage for a year or more, so the food items also need to be able to retain good flavour and nutrition over a period of time.
ROSS COAD: So, we would do storage trials and taste testing to see how they taste at the beginning and at intervals throughout this storage period. So this helped us to provide advice on the stability of various food items, and we were comfortable with providing advice on storage stability, but we were much less comfortable providing advice on whether soldiers would actually like and consume various items based on our sensory valuation, our taste testing, and this was because our in house taste panel was comprised of mostly females. That was our workforce, with a median age of over 40 years. Soldiers, on the other hand, were mostly male with a median age of less than 30 years. So, we were simply the wrong demographic group, and our panel was also fairly small, but we didn't make the decisions. Capability, Acquisition and Sustainment Group made the decision on what went into ration packs, and they did listen to our concerns about the demographic problem, and over time, they did more testing with actual consumer groups to determine what soldiers would like to have in their ration packs while meeting the nutritional requirements. So, I'll give you an example. Our in-house taste panel consistently rated beef jerky type products poorly, and based on our taste panel results, we never had a clear basis on recommending beef jerky type products for inclusion in ration packs. Then we conducted field trials with real soldiers to evaluate this, the hot climate ration pack that I mentioned previously. And there was a beef jerky type of product, a beef steak bar, in there, and that rated very well. As a result, we had a basis on which to recommend it, and it ended up in the general-purpose ration pack. And of course, it was well received. So I guess, to answer your question, a food item proposed for inclusion in ration packs may be added based on the results of our laboratory or field testing, but needs to also have nutritional value, of course, but it also it may be added without any input from the scientists at all, and just see how it goes.
LAURA THOMAS: So, circling back to the field trials that you were doing, you were obviously on these to see whether the soldiers were eating what was in there. How were you assessing this? What were you doing?
ROSS COAD: Well, there were two things, actually, it's not just what they're eating, it's also measuring energy expenditure too. So, we would measure energy expenditure mostly by observation. We would sit and watch for a period of time what soldiers were doing, and then we would equate those physical activities with known, I’ll call them scales or energy values for those particular activities. In the 1980s through into the 1990s we used another method which gave a more accurate measurement of energy expenditure. It was called the doubly labelled water method. So, soldiers consumed isotopically labelled water, which was quite safe, but it enabled you to measure over a period of, say, seven to 10 days what the actual energy expenditure was based on the release of carbon dioxide. So, as you know, when we normally breathe, we release carbon dioxide, and as you consume energy, you release more carbon dioxide. But it gives you a way of measuring energy expenditure, which is quite, quite good.
ROSS COAD: So, then we needed to work out, of course, what they were actually eating to determine whether they were eating up to their energy expenditure level. And we did this by knowing how much food had been issued to them. I'm talking about when they were on ration packs here, little bit different when they've been fed in a mess. So, I'll just focus on ration pack feeding. We would know how many ration packs they were issued. We would record what menus they were issued with. They might be issued with, say, three or four days of food at a time. We would be there at time and point of issue, then over the next three to four days, we would go and meet up with the soldiers, hopefully at least once a day. Occasionally, we might have to skip a day, but the soldiers would be saving for us, all their packages of consumed food, so the empty packages, any unopened packages of food, so in other words, food they took out but didn't consume, as well as any packages of partially consumed food. So, you can imagine how that would be for the researchers in somewhere like Far North Queensland, temperatures in the low 30s, high humidity, and we would go out and collect a bag of we'll call them discards that had possibly been sitting around in the sun all day. And we would take them back to a central point, open them up, and then work out what soldiers had eaten based on the empty, full and partially consumed packages of food.
LAURA THOMAS: Which I imagine was accompanied by quite a strong smell in that heat.
ROSS COAD: Yes, I don't recall too many pleasant aromas around those sorts of activities there. It was not pleasant work, but it was important work, and we were happy to do it because it was the best way of determining what they'd actually consumed. In one field trial we did, we actually bar coded every single package that went out there, and we knew for every individual item, right down to a packet of chewing gum, which soldier it had been issued to. And we even knew if soldiers had swapped products, traded, which was quite common, you know, a soldier might not like a particular food, so they would swap it with another soldier. So, we had a way of keeping track of that as well. Not that we were trying to prevent it. We just wanted to understand how much each soldier had consumed.
LAURA THOMAS: And did this work take into account things like gender or cultural sensitivities? Because we obviously know energy input and output varies significantly between men and women, but there are also people who have religious preferences around food or are vegetarian or are vegan. Were you exploring this world?
ROSS COAD: Well, when we did field trials on ration packs, the number of females was either zero or so low that we would not have been able to analyse their data separately. We just couldn't collect the data so we couldn't make any distinction between males and females in those ration pack field trials that we discussed. Now where the actual nutritional requirements of men and women differ, the nutritional criteria for ration packs ensured that those different needs were covered by setting the requirement at the higher value. So, for example, men require eight milligrams of dietary iron per day, whereas women require 18 milligrams per day. So, ration packs were required to provide 18, so that meant that both men and women were covered by the amount of iron in a ration pack. Cultural sensitivities can be relatively easily addressed in fresh feeding, mess feeding, because here a wide variety of foods can be offered and address most anticipated cultural needs. It's more difficult with ration packs, because you've got a more restricted range of possibilities. Historically, the information sheet enclosed with each ration pack included a statement to say that it did not cater for consumers with food allergies or special dietary requirements. But I do recall, in the, probably the late 1990s at that stage, one of the military stakeholders that we were working with were certainly trying to introduce Halal ration packs, or at least Halal components into ration packs, but these earlier attempts to introduce a limited number of halal, kosher and even vegetarian ration pack menus met with resistance. However, that seems to have changed, because I've seen an article that indicates that based on the 2023 ration packing contract, this new contract, the inclusion of culturally sensitive menu options, seems to have gone ahead, and as far as I know, it's been less controversial. I haven't seen anything in the in the newspapers about it. So, I guess things have changed, which is good.
LAURA THOMAS: It is because I'm a vegetarian myself, and I assumed, maybe wrongly, that it is very uncontroversial and almost quite easy to be catered for. So, I was quite surprised that that's something that's relatively recent in this world.
ROSS COAD: Yes, there was one ration pack menu, might have been menu E I think, but that was known as the vegetarian menu, and I think it had baked beans in it instead of a meat-based meal. But you know, that was just one item. It was one menu. So, if you're a vegetarian on ration packs, you might have gotten sick of baked beans.
LAURA THOMAS: I certainly couldn't eat them every day, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess in this scenario.
ROSS COAD: No, look, I imagine, a pressure point on this topic is that defence recruiting targets have not been met for many years. So, if you can ensure that the feeding system, at least, is more attuned to a wide range of dietary and cultural needs, that would be one way of attracting recruits and retaining or at least not putting them off. But there's probably, and you've touched on this, there's probably pressure from serving members too, as a reflection of the general population, as their dietary and cultural needs no longer align so well with the old-style ration packs.
LAURA THOMAS: What were some of the other challenges that you encountered in your work?
ROSS COAD: I think the biggest challenge really was meeting the demand for our services. There were several reasons for this. We were competing for funding and access to military personnel when we're up against projects on combat systems, communications, gadgets in general, much more interesting than food and nutrition. In the military world, the focus has long been on developing better weapons, better vehicles for moving forces to and onto the battlefield, and better means of communication. Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks was familiar with this problem, and it hasn't entirely gone away. For those that don't know, Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks is the founder of the Australian Army Catering Corps, and he had to bring the Australian Army, kicking and screaming into the 20th century. But innovations in military food and nutrition science have come about, but it's generally through a steady grind, supported by most of the meagre funding. We talked before about a few of those significant advances, you know, the development of, flexible retort pouches. So, things have happened, but it's been slow. There have been positive challenges too. Over the period 2012 to 14, our site underwent a major redevelopment, and we were given the opportunity to provide input into the project right from the design stage through the final fitting out. And it went very well, and even though it was disruptive and a lot of work, the end product was an excellent facility on a great site in Scottsdale. So, the challenges were not always negative.
LAURA THOMAS: What you mentioned earlier about the funding and maybe a slight underappreciation of the importance of food and nutrition in defence is something that's been a recurring theme, both through this podcast and is explored in the Shrine's exhibition Taste of Combat. So, with your work in this space, what do you hope that people take away from your story and experiences?
ROSS COAD: Well, you mentioned under appreciation, I think amongst those defence persons directly involved in the defence feeding system, there was a good understanding and appreciation of the importance of catering and nutrition. And Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks deserves a lot of credit for what he's initiated. But beyond those personnel, the level of appreciation was less obvious, but they had other things to worry about, as I mentioned before, about weapons and so on. In terms of takeaway messages, I think I would like people to recognize that catering and nutrition in defence is extremely important. You can have the best military hardware and systems in the world, but if the operator loses concentration because they haven't been fed adequately, or if they suffer an injury and recover more slowly due to poor vitamin status, or, you know, if they become fatigued due to failure to consume a ration pack, then what have you gained from all that technology? People need to be fit and able and healthy so you can actually get the benefits of that technology.
LAURA THOMAS: Thank you so much, Ross, for sharing your experiences and insights today and giving us a glimpse into what actually goes into testing and developing food for the military in Australia. It's been wonderful.
ROSS COAD: Thank you, Laura, it's been a pleasure speaking with you.
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. Taste of Combat: the Evolution of Military Food is on display at the Shrine until November 2025. You can visit for free every day from 10am to 5pm. To learn more, head to shrine.org.au.
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