MREInfo.com

I recently printed out the menus page so I could check what was in my MREs before I opened them. I've had 4 in the past month and a half, and none of them contain the sides/snacks that are listed on the official menu. Sometimes I get wheat bread insead of crackers, or more commonly, cheese spread instead of peanut butter. One time I got Skittles® in a ravioli meal, which isn't supposed to have candy at all. It's been happening with MREs from different companies too, so it doesn't seem to be a QC thing at one particular packing plant.
It's not a big deal, it's actually kinda fun guessing what's going to really be in there, and knowing how government contracts are usually handled guess I shouldn't really be surprised, but it seems to happen a lot.
Any ideas?

Hi ockham. There could be a couple of things going on here:

1. The MRE menus don't always match up with the MRE contents because the menus don't run in calendar years - January to December. MRE menus are more like school years in the US. The 2005 school year might run from August, 2005 through June, 2006. In the same way, the 2005 MREs might run from April 2005 until March 2006. Or July 2005, until May 2006. There's almost no way of knowing for sure unless you keep an eye on MRE contract awards and when production of certain years is scheduled to start and end.

For me, if I have an MRE from early in the year (Jan-April), I usually figure it's a crap shoot whether that menu is from the year on the datecode or the previous year.

2. Sometime the MRE producers make substitutions at random. Maybe they ran out of wheat snack bread that day and substituted crackers or maybe they ran out of pound cake and substituted candy - you just never know. But from what I've seen, the contents are usually pretty close to the menus with just the occasional exception (and #1 above).