Introducing Wholesum Cookbooks: 280+ Field-Tested Recipes, Ready to Plan

Most people who find Wholesum arrive with a stack of recipes already in hand — a binder from the boathouse, a spreadsheet passed down from the last food buyer, a few favorites scrawled on an index card. The software gives that collection structure: scale it, price it, shop it, adapt it for the two vegetarians and the one gluten-free guest.

But plenty of people arrive with nothing. They know they're feeding twelve people for six days and that's about as far as it goes.

That's who our new Cookbooks are for.

Three collections, built for how you actually travel

We've published three curated recipe collections. These aren't scraped from the internet — they come out of years in the field, written and reviewed by professionals in the industry and informed by industry standards and best practices.

Each collection is built around a different food preservation reality, which is really what separates one trip type from another:

  • Whitewater Rafting — 104 recipes. Written assuming you have a cooler. Crowd-pleasing breakfasts, lunches, dinners, sides, and treats that are easy to prepare in camp, where you've got space, a table, and an audience.
  • Backpacking Trips — 93 recipes. Entirely shelf-stable and lightweight, for meals you carry on your back and pull off with minimal equipment.
  • Canoe Voyages — 86 recipes. Shelf-stable for roughly three to five days, no cooler necessary. Ingredients that travel well and realistic portions for hungry paddlers.

That's 283 recipes across breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and desserts — not a generic recipe dump, but meals chosen because they hold up on the water and on the trail.

Browse free. Import when you're ready.

Anyone can read the cookbooks at wholesum.app/cook_books — no account, no signup. Page through them the way you'd page through a friend's binder.

If you have a Wholesum account, you can import straight into your own library — the whole cookbook, or just the individual recipes you want. Take all 104 rafting recipes, or take the four breakfasts you know your crew will actually eat.

From there they behave like anything else you've built: scale them to your group size, flag dietary restrictions and let Wholesum handle the substitutions, and generate shopping and packing lists you can export to PDF or Excel.

The gap between "I have no idea what to feed these people" and "here's the shopping list" just got a lot shorter.

Also new: a Personal plan

Alongside the cookbooks, we've launched Personal — a plan for individuals planning food for groups of friends and family rather than running a commercial operation. It covers one meal plan at a time for up to 15 people, with recipe scaling, dietary substitutions, shopping and packing list exports, calendar planning, and Olive AI-generated recipes. $13/month, billed annually.

Wholesum was built for outfitters and camps, and that's still the heart of it. But the family reunion cook, the trip leader organizing a private permit, the friend who always ends up doing the food — they've been asking for a version that fits, and now there is one. More on Personal in a separate post soon.

Start here

Take a look at the cookbooks: wholesum.app/cook_books

Pick the collection that matches your next trip, import it, and start planning.

A note before you head out: these recipes are a starting point, not a substitute for your own judgment. Review every menu for your group's dietary restrictions and allergies, appetite sizes, and nutritional needs — expedition appetites vary widely by trip length, exertion level, and weather, and only you know who you're feeding.