When you think of freeze-dried food, what springs to mind? A cheeky Pot Noodle? A foil pouch of steaming, odorous brown mush? Whatever it is, you’re unlikely to find it emotionally or nutritionally rewarding. That’s what drove Giulio Bertelli to found Akta a year ago, to bring quality ingredients, balanced nutrition and emotional reward to the freeze-dried meal market.
As bowman on offshore racing boats for many years, he knew the opportunity existed. ‘The general understanding of freeze drying is not positive,’ Bertelli says, ‘but the technology is not the problem. Most of the time, it’s poor quality food with a lot of additives.
‘It takes more time, attention and precision, but our approach is that we cook as if it were a homemade stew or soup, and we freeze dry it without adding anything else. To achieve that, we had to research, but instead of solving problems by adding sugar or emulsifiers, we worked on the cuisine. Our USP is that, when looking at nutritional balance, we also look at the amount of real fibres like leaf vegetables in the casserole, to maximise digestibility and avoid constipation too, which can often be an issue.’
Akta started with five dishes and now four new savoury dishes and three breakfasts have been added, all Italian and vegetarian. The sources of recipe inspiration are as wholesome and uplifting as the dishes themselves. ‘It's a mix. One of the new recipes is rice with beans, a dish that I used to eat with my grandfather. In the future, you might come to me because you want to row across the Atlantic. If there’s something that would boost your mood on a hard night, maybe that soup that your uncle used to make? Let's try to freeze dry it. That's the service we would like to give to the extreme environment industry,’ Bertelli says.
‘From next year, we will start to introduce meat-based recipes. The longterm plan is to look at regional cuisines, French, English, Dutch, because it's the idea of a memory. It's the idea that food is not just a problem to be solved in a difficult environment, but that you look forward to that meal. That's our point.’
It’s surprising that an element so vital to offshore performance has not had more focus. Most freeze-dried meals may give you enough calories but the needs of someone in an extreme environment run deeper than that. ‘Digestibility is a big problem with traditional freeze-dried meals,’ Bertelli observes. ‘They generate constipation and they are hard to digest because of additives. There are a lot of things that are not very healthy, but it's not about health per se, it's about the fact that you are there to perform as an athlete and you want to be well fuelled.’
To make sure the nutritional balance and digestibility is right on the money, Akta partners with experts, including the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, and Kitchen Lab in Bolzano’s NOI Techpark. ‘NOI Techpark has what is called a synthetic stomach,’ he explains. ‘They replicate the digestive system with machines so you can test what digestive acids do to each meal, to each ingredient.’
While Akta’s origins lie offshore, his ambition for Akta is expansive, and its reach has already increased. ‘An example is Aaron Durogati, the Hike-and-Fly athlete, paragliding and running. (He won the 2025 Red Bull X-Alps, a 1,283km race across the Alps). He eats Akta in the week prior to competition because he wants to keep his diet balanced and precise, to know exactly how much he eats. He doesn't want the hassle of hiring a chef, he doesn’t want food poisoning or the risk of having a bad stomach on the day of the competition. Freeze dried is very safe.
‘We worked with a climber and his team, who didn't want to carry empty food pouches while hiking through Patagonia. He asked if we could make pouches that could be burnt. So we researched paperbased food pouches,’ Bertelli explains.
‘It's another example of personalisation. As soon as we have grown as a company, I would like to focus on this. I want Akta to get to where not only sailing teams, but maybe a cycling team, wants us to do all of their meal prepping. We could work on nutrition with the team chef to create the meals together, but freeze drying adds shelf life and food hygiene.
‘I would like the company to be recognised as a very premium version of freeze-dried food for the outdoor environment, for any form of exploration or sports, so that food does not become a problem, but a moment that can be looked forward to, even if you’re towing a sledge to the South Pole. If cooking is not possible, you can still have a high quality, healthy nutritional meal.’
