My Camp Kitchen packs a full wilderness kitchen in a box

My Camp Kitchen offers both storage and food prep space

If you've ever camped, you know how difficult it can be to stay organized. There's so much gear that you need just to eat, sleep and relax, and if you lose just one piece, it could ruin your whole trip. My Camp Kitchen is a kitchen storage solution that keeps all your cooking and eating gear in one neat package.

This past week, I took a mountain biking trip to Moab, Utah. The wind was harsh for one particular day and night, so I chose to sleep in the back of my Dodge Durango rather than chew on sandstorm all night. That was the best night of sleep I had all trip, and the Durango was so functional as a makeshift camper, I've decided to outfit it a little further for the purpose.

One of the challenges of converting a regular SUV to a camper is that you don't really have space or headroom for things like kitchens and bathrooms the way you would in a full RV or trailer. The My Camp Kitchen makes for a good solution for outfitting a small camper with cooking equipment. It's a purpose-built hardwood box with a variety of shelves and cubbies designed to hold all your cooking gear in one small, easy-access place. When you arrive at camp, you can pull the box out, unfold its legs, pull out the counter and use it to prepare all your meals. Your cooking gear is always right where you need it.

The My Camp Kitchen (or something like it) would work great for my Durango camper in that it would give me a single dedicated space for all my cooking equipment, instead of the series of boxes, bags and coolers that I use now. It also pulls out in one motion, so that I could quickly repurpose the interior space for sleep mode.

My Camp Kitchen comes in two primary models – the Summit Traveler and the Outdoorsman. The Outdoorsman starts at US$350 for an unassembled kit and runs through $575 for the fully assembled and finished product. Both prices are for the hardwood components only; the actual cooking gear costs extra. You can get gear through the My Camp Kitchen website – the $399 package gives you a single burner propane stove and a series of cooking and eating tools and dishes – or you can outfit it with your own gear.

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$500 price tag seemed a little expensive when I first read it – it is just a wood box after all – but it is competitive with similar camp kitchen storage solutions. The assembly-required version is nice for saving money, and if that's still too spendy, you could always use the MCK as the inspiration for a home build.

My Camp Kitchen founder Richard Snogren, an aerospace engineer by trade, has been field testing and fine tuning his designs for decades. Several other designs, including a grill system, are scheduled to join the Outdoorsman and Summit systems in the product line.

Watch the My Camp Kitchen go through the wringer in the following video from the recent Overland Expo.