# Processed Food

| Field | Value |
|-------|-------|
| Name | Processed Food |
| Tier | intermediate |
| Elasticity | inelastic |
| Base Price (Tractus) | 15 |
| Bulk Class | standard |
| Unit | tonnes |
| Production Ubiquity | ubiquitous |
| Demand Model | utility |
| Commission Certified | No |
| Compact Contested | No |
| Shadow Viable | No |
| Panic Threshold (weeks) | 2 |
| Description | Shelf-stable, transportable food products. |

Processed food is agricultural produce run through preservation, packaging, and shelf-stabilization. The recipe requires 1.5t of agricultural produce and 0.2t of water per tonne of output — a simple, energy-light process that every settled world with surplus agriculture runs continuously. The output is transportable through gates without viability loss, which is precisely the point: raw produce cannot clear multiple hops, but processed food can move Reach-wide on standard freight schedules.

The two-week panic threshold is lower than it looks. Most inhabited nodes maintain 2–6 weeks of processed food stock as standard operational reserves. A supply disruption triggering hoarding behavior compresses that buffer quickly, particularly in high-population orbital stations where local food production is negligible and processed food is the primary caloric supply. Stations are more exposed than planetary surfaces; a gate blockage affecting a station's primary food route becomes a crisis in days rather than weeks.

Ubiquitous production means processed food rarely generates price signals worth chasing on its own. The trading interest is in agricultural production disruptions upstream — a bad harvest on a surplus world ripples into processed food availability two to three production cycles later, and by then the price signal has already moved. Follow the agricultural conditions, not the shelf-stable output.