The Emergency Rations on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

Alone's rules restrict emergency rations to an approved sub-type list: jerky, dried legumes, biltong, hardtack, chocolate, pemmican, GORP or trail mix, flour, rice, sugar, or salt. One outside gear roundup in the site's item catalog tags the whole category "famously-skipped." The season-by-season data says the opposite. Of the 187 contestants across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, 101 have a recorded gear list, and 29 of those 101 carried some form of approved ration, more than a quarter of the tracked field, and easily more common than several items with a stronger public reputation for popularity.

Pemmican is the dominant sub-type among winners

Six different winning contestants carried a ration, and pemmican is the specific sub-type behind four of them. David McIntyre won season 2 with 5 pounds of pemmican, the largest single ration weight on record. Jim Baird and Ted Baird won season 4 as a father-son team carrying 2 pounds of pemmican between their shared list. Woniya Thibeault won the Alone: Frozen spinoff with roughly 2 pounds of pemmican as well. Sam Larson won season 5 in Mongolia on a different pair of sub-types entirely, 2 pounds of flour and 2 pounds of trail mix (GORP), skipping pemmican altogether. Krzysztof Wojtkowski's winning season 2 run on Alone Australia is recorded simply as "Rations," with no sub-type specified in the source.

The rest of the field leans on it too

Beyond the winners, emergency rations show up heavily in a few specific seasons. Season 3 in Patagonia is the biggest cluster: 9 of that season's 10 contestants carried some listed ration, described uniformly as "emergency food rations" with no sub-type named. Season 9 in Labrador saw three more picks, including runner-up Karie Lee Knoke. Season 12's Kelsey Loper, runner-up in the Great Karoo, used two separate slots on rice and sugar rather than a single combined "rations" entry, the only contestant in the data to split the category across two of her ten picks that way.

Season	Recorded ration carriers	Of that season's recorded lists
US 3 (Patagonia)	9	10
US 1 (Vancouver Island)	4	10
US 4 (Great Slave Lake, team format)	4	4
US 9 (Labrador)	3	10
US 5 (Mongolia)	2	9
US 2 (Vancouver Island)	2	2
AUS 2 (Fiordland)	1	1
Frozen	1	3

Why the "famously skipped" label doesn't hold up

The catalog's single product example, a Steve's Original pemmican bar priced around $8 to $10, is marked as a generic category illustration rather than a contestant-verified pick, so no specific brand can be attributed to any of the real carries above; every sourced entry names only a weight or a sub-type, never a commercial product. What the outside "famously-skipped" label likely reflects is that emergency rations get less coverage in gear write-ups than a knife or an axe does, not that contestants actually avoid the category. Nearly a third of all recorded gear lists include one, which puts it ahead of items like the salt block or soap by a wide margin. Where the catalog's summary label and the season-by-season gear lists disagree this directly, the season data is the version treated as accurate here, and it points to emergency rations being one of the more commonly used categories on the entire approved list, not one of the least.

For the complete sub-type rules and the one catalog example, see the emergency rations gear page, and for how that food actually gets used across a season, what Alone contestants eat, season by season covers the foraging and hunting side of the same question.