TrailFed

TrailFed is a camp-cooking platform we built and run — 260+ recipes for the campfire, Dutch oven, and one-burner stove, a trip meal planner, and a paid membership — designed from the first wireframe to win search for an entire category. Good food for when the pavement ends, and a working showcase of how we build membership businesses.

The problem

Recipe sites are the worst neighborhood on the internet: ten paragraphs of life story, forty ad units, and a recipe written for a kitchen with a stocked pantry and four burners. Camp cooking is a different problem — you have whatever you packed, maybe no cooler, limited water, and one heat source. Nobody was building for the constraint-first way people actually cook outside. So we did, drawing on years of camp recipes collected through our own overlanding brand.

What we built

• Constraint-first recipe search — “What did you pack?” filters by kit (campfire, one burner, Dutch oven, no cooler, low water, under 20 minutes, backpacking) and cuisine, and “What’s in your cooler?” matches recipes to the ingredients on hand — and shows what’s missing.
• Trip Kitchen — the flagship: tell it days, people, and what you cook on, and it plans a meal for every slot with one combined grocery list, the gear to pack, and a printable trip pack.
• A real membership business — free accounts get every public recipe, saved favorites, and shopping lists; the $24/year Crew tier adds unlimited trip packs, weekly Crew-only recipes, and the right to publish recipes under their own Camp Chef byline. Contributor content is reviewed before it ships, with credit built in.
• Gated content done right — Crew-only recipes hide both ingredients and steps from non-members behind a clear badge, and we deliberately keep member content out of public structured data: paid content shouldn’t leak through rich results. Public recipes get the full schema treatment and earn the rankings.
• A publishing engine behind it — the kitchen keeps itself stocked: new recipes flow in on a steady schedule, every one tagged by method, meal, cuisine, and constraints, with human review before anything goes live.

Why it matters here

TrailFed shows the full Gorilla Public stack in one product: custom WordPress engineering, SEO and AEO architecture aimed at owning a category, conversion-first membership design, subscription commerce, and an editorial system that scales without going slop. It’s also proof we build things people pay for monthly and keep — the same model behind our $65/month websites. Got a niche your business could own the same way? Let’s talk.