Terms of use

Last updated: 19 September 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and TRAIL FUEL, operated from Ontario, Canada. By using this site you accept them. If you do not, please do not use the planner. They work alongside our privacy policy and cookies and storage page.

This is a planning tool, not advice

TRAIL FUEL produces estimates for trip planning. It is not medical, nutritional or dietary advice, and it is not a substitute for a professional who knows your health history. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, or have a diagnosed eating or metabolic disorder, talk to a clinician before relying on any calorie figure here.

It is built on adult physiology and should not be used to plan a child’s food.

Estimates are estimates

The model is built on published physiology — the Pandolf load-carriage equation, the Santee correction for descents, and Mifflin-St Jeor for resting metabolism. Those are good models with real error bars. Your actual energy needs depend on things no form can capture: sleep, heat, illness, altitude, how much you talk on the trail.

The plan is also only ever as good as what you type into it. Distance and elevation are the two figures that move the answer most, and an under-reported climb produces a confident number that is too low.

Always carry more food than the plan says, and never let a calculator talk you out of a safety margin.

Your responsibility

• You are responsible for your own safety in the backcountry.
• Check your route, permits and conditions with the land manager — for Ontario provincial parks, that is Ontario Parks.
• Tell someone your route and your expected return time.
• Verify allergen information on the actual packaging you buy.
• Carry the means to deal with running short: a reserve, a bail-out option, and a way to call for help.

Where the nutrition figures come from

Nutrition data for generic foods comes from USDA FoodData Central, which is in the public domain. Figures are per 100 g of the food as described — dry weight for anything you rehydrate on trail. Branded items come from Open Food Facts, a crowdsourced database. A handful of specialty items are transcribed from manufacturer panels or, where noted, are documented category averages rather than a specific product.

Your actual groceries will differ. Brands vary, crowdsourced records can be wrong, and a generic reference value is not the panel on the bag in your hand. Every food we list shows its source so you can check it.

Allergies

Allergen tags are assigned by hand against Health Canada’s priority allergen list. They describe the generic food, not the specific product on the shelf: manufacturers change formulations, and shared production lines cause cross-contamination that no database captures. Always read the label. If an allergy is severe, do not rely on this tool alone.

Where we could not confirm a product’s allergen list from its label, that product is withheld from anyone who has declared an allergy rather than shown with an empty list. That is a deliberate safety choice, and it is still not a substitute for reading the packaging.

Affiliate links

Some products we suggest are affiliate links, and we earn a commission if you buy through them at no extra cost to you. This does influence which products appear. Where two foods would serve you about equally well, a commissionable one is favoured.

What it does not influence is how much food you are told to carry. Your calorie figure, food weight and pack weight are calculated from your route, your body and your gear before any product is considered. No commercial relationship changes those numbers, and nothing you have told us you are allergic to — or that conflicts with your diet — is ever shown to you because it pays us.

If that trade is not one you want to rely on, every food we list shows its calorie density and source, so you can substitute your own.

How you may use the site

You may use TRAIL FUEL for your own trip planning, and for planning trips for people you are going with. Print a plan, share a plan link, take it into the woods.

Please do not:

• Scrape the site, or send automated or bulk requests to it or to the services behind it. The trail search and social-card routes are rate limited, and circumventing that is not permitted.
• Resell the output as your own service, or present it as professional nutritional advice — yours or ours.
• Interfere with the site’s operation or security, or use it to break any law.

Availability and changes

The site is offered as it is and as it happens to be available. Features marked beta — the trail search in particular — are known to be incomplete, and any part of the site may change or be withdrawn without notice. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and the services we depend on are outside our control.

Ownership and licences

The site, its text and its calorie model belong to TRAIL FUEL. The source code is published separately under the MIT licence, and where that licence applies it governs the code.

Third-party data carries its own terms, which travel with it: USDA FoodData Central is public domain; the Open Food Facts extract is licensed under the Open Database Licence; OpenStreetMap data behind the trail search is also under the Open Database Licence and is attributed where it is shown. Plans you generate are yours.

Liability

TRAIL FUEL is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, TRAIL FUEL is not liable for any loss, injury, illness, damage or expense arising from your use of this tool or your reliance on its output, including indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to CAD $100 or the amount you have paid us in the previous twelve months, whichever is greater.

Nothing here excludes liability that the law does not allow to be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under consumer protection legislation that applies to you. If you are a consumer, you keep your statutory rights.

Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used the site — for example by reselling its output, or by using it in a way these terms prohibit — you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with that claim.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the site does. The date at the top says when they last did, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised version. Material changes will be flagged on the site rather than made quietly.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada, and the courts of Ontario, Canada have jurisdiction over any dispute — except that if you are a consumer elsewhere, you may still have the right to bring a claim in your own courts.

If part of this does not hold

If any provision here is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply, and the unenforceable part is read down to the narrowest change that makes it valid. Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.

Contact

Questions about these terms: ctm313@gmail.com, or through the contact page.