So you've heard people make fun of preppers, but secretly you're a little concerned about just how many cans of stewed tomatoes you could stomach if you got stuck inside during bad weather. Not to mention that there's a limit to how much diet soda anyone should drink in a day, and that's the only beverage you have in stock. A good first step to emergency preparedness is having a few meals that require little-to-no effort to prepare. These are exactly the kinds of meals that Wise Company specializes in. For the absolute least commitment, they'll even ship you a free meal to try, and you only pay $3.95 shipping and handling. If you want to get a better sense for the variety available, we recommend trying the Wise Emergency Food Favorites Sample. Four different meals, four servings each, means you could feed 16 people (or perhaps your family four times) for only $19.99. If you like what you try you can buy in bulk and enjoy even better pricing per meal.

Shopping Experience:

The product listing page includes all of the basic information you might be interested in. This particular sample packet gives you a broad variety of items to try, including lasagna, rotini, stroganoff, and soup with pasta. You'll notice the common theme of pasta products in all four packets. If you're building your emergency pantry you may also want to consider looking at their selection of freeze dried meats, fruits, and vegetables.

Order & Checkout:

After you select the quantity you would like and click the "Add to Cart" button you'll be taken to your shopping cart, where you can review what you're intending to purchase. This is also a good opportunity to fill in a coupon code, in order to secure a discount on your purchase. We grabbed ours at TheCoupon.Co.

Make sure you click "Apply Coupon" in order to guarantee your savings. In this case we were able to get 15% off the total order price.

When checking out, you can opt to remain a guest, or you can register. In our opinion it's always handy to register, even if you're a first-time customer simply trying some samples. Being able to easily pull up your order history, not to mention save your info for future orders if you choose to purchase here again, simply makes sense from a time saving perspective.

Still on the same page, you'll enter all of your billing information, and you can opt to quickly have the billing address copy over as your shipping address, if that suits.

For our order of only $19.99 we opted to pay the standard shipping rate of $6. There are coupons available though for free shipping, and depending on how big your order is that can be a better deal that a discount code.

Next enter your credit card information, or you can pay securely through PayPal.

Finally, review your order to make sure you have the correct product, discount, shipping option, and final price. If you're not sure you can always click on the link to Edit Your Cart.

After you place your order you'll get a confirmation on the screen, along with your order total and order ID.

Within moments you'll be receiving an email with all of the order details listed. There's also a 1-800 number listed in the confirmation email, for your added convenience should you need to reach out. Wise Company easily offers one of the best order and checkout processes in the vertical.

Delivery & Unboxing:

Shipping isn't the speediest, with typical orders arriving between 7 and 14 days after purchase. In our case it was on the slower side of things. If you're proactive with your emergency preparedness planning you can get some good deals from Wise, but you may not want to be placing an order at the same time as you see the news about a tornado watch for the next 24 hours. However, we can't fault them for slow delivery, because they are upfront about the time it'll take to receive your order.

In our case, our order arrived in a standard cardboard shipping box. Nothing fancy, but it doesn't have to be when you're dealing with something like preparing for a disaster. Frills will do you no good in a hurricane.

The packaging for the product itself - the Wise Company Emergency Survival Freeze Dried Food Favorites Sample - is very compact.

The four meals are neatly slotted into the box.

There's even a handy emergency preparedness checklist on the side of the box!

Most of us will already have a lot of these items available in our home, but the ones that aren't commonly found will be food and water supplies. The packets of emergency food were exactly as pictured on the website. Instead of waiting for bad things to happen, it's worth tasting these entrées to see what you like, what you don't, and what you think you could eat on repeat if you needed to.

Plus, if you're ever in a pinch, one of these pouches is a lightning fast dinner hack, taking only about 15 minutes to prepare, and you don't have to worry about it going bad over the course of a couple of years, because the extended shelf-life means these meals will be just as delicious a decade from now as they are today!

All in all Wise Company has an easy-to-use website and an extremely smooth order process. Their packaging is simple and functional, and serves its purpose well. The fact that their meals actually taste like real food makes Wise Company a solid choice when you're preparing for a (very, very) rainy day.