Calorie redemption per mile
I recently took a flight with United, and out of boredom decided to look at the snack menu. I noticed that there were plenty of snacks that you could pay for - normal - but the funny thing was you could also purchase those snacks with airline miles at a horrible redemption rate of 1$ = 100 points.
This got me wondering, what if we instead used calories as a measure of redemption value instead of dollars, maybe it actually is more worthwhile to use these miles for a sick bump of nutrition.
So on my flight, I did what any normal person would do and started to collect data from every purchasable food on my flight, I left off the nuts.com snacks for reasons I will mention below, I also left the snackboxes off because I did not want to purchase 30$ of food on a flight and not eat it. I soon realized, I would have to either purchase these snacks to get the calorie count or pay for wifi (800 miles or 8$) to get the data.
I chose neither, and waited till we landed to get the data I needed with pure old searching...:P
Below is a table of the data I compiled, for your amusement, I highlighted in green the "best" of each category.
| Item | Miles | Cost On United | IRL Cost | Calories | Fat (g) | Carbs (g) | Protein (g) | Calorie Per Mile | Protein Per Mile (g) | Carbs Per Mile (g) | Fat Per Mile (g) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muddy Bites | 500 | $5.00 | $4.99 | 300 | 10 | 49 | 4 | 0.60 | 0.020 | 0.098 | 0.008 | [link] |
| Pringles | 500 | $5.00 | $1.50 | 375 | 22.5 | 34 | 2.5 | 0.75 | 0.045 | 0.068 | 0.005 | [link] |
| Vegobears | 600 | $6.00 | $4.99 | 320 | 0 | 80 | 0 | 0.53 | 0.000 | 0.133 | 0.000 | [link] |
| Better Sour Mango Gummy Shells | 600 | $6.00 | $3.49 | 140 | 0 | 40 | 0 | 0.23 | 0.000 | 0.067 | 0.000 | [link] |
| Diamond Bakery Guava Shortbread Cookies | 700 | $7.00 | $4.95 | 600 | 36 | 68 | 8 | 0.86 | 0.051 | 0.097 | 0.011 | [link] |
Your best bet is to go to Hawaii
It appears like the best bet for you to go to is Hawaii, because on that flight you can get a whole 0.86 calories per mile, but if you're on any other United flight, you best be picking pringles, with 0.75 calories. The one thing though, if you factor in that buying pringles itself IRL is only like a dollar, you're still getting ripped off. If we factor in the IRL cost the Muddy Bites are the way to go, with 0.6 calories per mile, you can rest well knowing you could've spent those 500 miles on some snack instead of being 300 miles too short to pay for wifi on a 1 hour flight. (I think we could do a mb-per-mile redemption analysis in the future I guess)
Tangent: Nuts(dot)com
For some reason, it was actually really hard to get the nutrition information for the “Pop & Sol Sea Salt and Vinegar Nut Mix”, their manufacturer, nuts.com seems to have no information on their website for anything related to pop&sol, it almost seems like the whole line was product was discontinued asides from residual supply sold at Walmart and United. I eventually found a source on an website called world.openfoodfacts.org but there was no source photo and the number seemed very wrong. I should’ve asked to purchase this snack…for now I will leave it off our data, same with the Ono mix by nuts.com They seem to be keen on not sharing nutrition data with anyone.