The specific objectives were 1) to determine the apparent heat capacity and other thermo-physical properties of five different food items using their component data and a differential scanning calorimeter, and 2) to develop and validate a numerical model of the frozen army menu box containing those food items, to predict the heat transfer within the menu box with respect to external temperature conditions. Extension of this research which focused on predicting food safety during real-time temperature abuse scenarios by correlating the numerically simulated thermal behavior of food items to microbial growth kinetics is presented in a subsequent manuscript.