Monster Hunter World: How to Upgrade Canteen

In Monster Hunter World the Canteen plays a vital role to your survival. You need to eat meals before missions to increase your health, stamina and gain beneficial buffs.

When the game starts there are only few ingredients available.
To upgrade the canteen and unlock better meals you need to find new cooking ingredients.

• You can unlock better ingredients by doing quests for the Cook in Astera (the cat standing behind the Canteen). He will have a yellow exclamation mark (!) above his head when new quests are available. More of them show up as you progress through the game.
• You can also get ingredients from delivery quests for other people. So don’t just sell all the items you find, keep them for delivery quests later. Always talk to people with yellow exclamation marks above their head – they may have a delivery quest for you!
• Some delivery quests are from researchers encountered in expeditions. They are marked on the world map.
• The Canteen will be upgraded automatically at specific points in the story, thus getting much better ingredients. Sometime between 6-star and 7-star assignments you will unlock a 4th ingredient type called “Drinks” and the amount of slots per meal increases from 3 to 6. Thus you can put a lot more buffs in your food.

The ingredients stay permanently and can be used infinitely for all future meals. Once you’ve unlocked them you never have to find them again!
Some limits apply: You can only use them for one meal per quest. When you faint the meal effect fades away. After every quest they can be used for the next meal.

Ideally, you would have so many ingredients that you can cook multiple health-increasing meals per quest. In case you die you could order another one. Better ingredients also give better buffs and increase the health/stamina gain.

Later into the game you also unlock a new category of ingredients, called “Drinks” (at first you have only Meat, Fish, Vegetables). At this point you can use 6 ingredients per meal instead of the standard 3. Thus your meals have a lot stronger buffs. Try not to faint as the meal loses its effect when you do.