The Field Kitchen That Won Overland Journal's Editor's Choice — and Almost Disappeared
In 2010 I was a college kid with an engineering degree in progress, no money, and a browser tab I kept coming back to: a portable camp kitchen made of deep-drawn aluminum and Baltic birch, designed by a German industrial designer named Harald Kanz. I couldn't afford it. I couldn't stop looking at it either.
The next year, Overland Journal gave it their Editor's Choice. I remember feeling weirdly vindicated — the way you do when the band you found first gets famous. Then life happened. I graduated, built some companies, got married, started camping with my own kids. The tab closed.
Ten years later I went to finally buy the thing.
The company was for sale.
What Harald built
Harald Kanz founded Kanz Outdoors in 2009 and spent twelve years refining essentially one idea: that a camp kitchen should be a piece of industrial design, not a plastic tote with delusions. He was an award-winning designer who'd been sketching tents and fire setups since childhood camping trips in Germany, and it showed in the details most people never consciously notice but everyone feels.
The Field Kitchen's panels are deep-drawn from marine-grade aluminum — pressed into shape from a single sheet, no seams, no welds waiting to fail. The work surface is Baltic birch, the void-free plywood used in aircraft interiors. The lid comes off and becomes a serving tray; fold it back and it's a wind screen. There's a full-width silverware drawer, because Harald understood that digging through a tote for a fork in the dark is the small indignity that ruins camp cooking. The whole thing folds flat, weighs about 25 pounds, and opens in under a minute.
The press noticed. Beyond the Editor's Choice, the Field Kitchen was covered in Outside, New Atlas, The Kitchn, and Expedition Portal. The Field Pantry — the matching food-storage unit — earned USFS and IGBC bear-resistance certification, a legal-in-grizzly-country credential most of the category still doesn't have.
And here's the part that still gets me: Harald never ran a single paid ad. No marketing budget, a sporadic Facebook page, and a product that earned its reputation entirely on the merits. There's something admirable in that. There's also a lesson, because in 2020, after more than a decade, Harald decided to pursue other things and quietly closed the doors.
A product this good almost vanished because nobody ever told people it existed.
The purchase
When I discovered the whole company was for sale — designs, tooling, name, everything — I did what any reasonable adult with a family and a mortgage would do: I thought about it very carefully, and then I bought it anyway. February 2021. Everything Harald had built, physical and digital, became my responsibility.
I want to be precise about what I am and am not. I'm not a private-equity guy who found an "underexploited brand asset." I'm an engineer who wanted this exact product for eleven years, went to buy one, and found out the only way to get one was to buy the factory. So the revival isn't a rebrand or a reinvention. The deep-drawn aluminum, the birch, the design that won the awards — all of it stays. My job is to give this thing the two ingredients it never had: manufacturing that's here, and marketing that exists.
Bringing the build home
The first big decision was where to build. The answer, after a lot of quoting and a few humbling lessons in modern manufacturing economics, ended up closer to home than I expected: American-sourced components — the Baltic birch CNC-cut by Mountain Metalworks, just up the road in northern New Mexico — with final assembly on our own benches at our shop in Taos. In early July 2026 I paid the deposit on the wood for the first production run since the revival.
Six numbered units available.
I know how that sounds. Six is a small number, and it's small on purpose. First batches are where you find out what the drawings didn't tell you — which tolerances the old tooling actually held, which details modern processes can do better. I would rather build a first batch right, learn, and build the next batch better than push out sixty with problems baked in. That's not a supply-chain limitation talking; it's the engineering degree.
Each numbered unit carries a plate. Not as a gimmick — because the first batch of a revived twelve-year design deserves to be traceable, and because thirty years from now, when one of them turns up at an estate sale still working, I want whoever finds it to know what they're holding.
Why bother
Somewhere in the last twenty years, camp gear became disposable. Particle-board chuck boxes that swell in the first rain. Plastic totes that crack in the cold. Gear priced to be replaced, sold by brands designed to be sold.
The Field Kitchen is the counterargument, and it's why I couldn't let it die. It's the anti-disposable position stated in aluminum and birch: buy one good thing, use it for decades, hand it down. My kids are learning to cook on this kitchen. Their kids will probably burn pancakes on the same one. That's the entire business plan, honestly — build things worth inheriting, and tell people they exist, which is the one thing this brand never did.
Harald built something worth saving. I'm the customer who wouldn't let it disappear. The workshop is running again.
The first batch — six numbered units available — lands in August, and the waitlist gets them first, in signup order. If you've been waiting since 2010 like I was, join the list. No spam; word when it's your turn, plus recipes and trip reports worth reading.