Nistepakke - literally packed-meal package - is the traditional Norwegian packed lunch, prepared each morning at a lodge or hotel and carried by the walker, cyclist or skier through the day. The standard contents are bread (typically dense Norwegian rye or oat-rye, with butter), cheese (often brunost and a more conventional white cheese), sliced cured meat or salami, a piece of fruit, a chocolate bar (the Norwegian Kvikk Lunsj - literally quick lunch - is the classic), and a thermos of coffee.
The convention is genuinely embedded in Norwegian outdoor culture. Norwegian schoolchildren take a daily nistepakke from home; Norwegian office workers take a nistepakke to work; Norwegian families on a Sunday walk in the local forest take nistepakke. The commercial restaurant tradition that defines lunch in most other European countries is much weaker in Norway, partly because the nistepakke tradition has historically filled the same niche. The result is that lunch on any active Norwegian trip is, by default, a self-contained packed meal eaten on a flat rock with a view, rather than a mid-trip restaurant stop.
On a multi-day trip, nistepakke is included in the standard inclusions on essentially every Norwegian active-travel package. The lodge prepares the day's bag during the breakfast service and hands it to the traveler as they leave. The bread and cheese keeps for the day; the fruit and chocolate provide the calorie boost on the harder afternoons; the thermos coffee is genuinely necessary on the cold-weather trips. International visitors are sometimes surprised by the simplicity of the meal compared to lunch traditions elsewhere; most come around to it within a few days.
The single small refinement worth knowing about: the Kvikk Lunsj chocolate bar (Freia, since 1937) is genuinely a Norwegian cultural object rather than a generic confection. The traditional packaging shows the Norwegian Mountain Code (fjellvettreglene) on the inside of the wrapper. Norwegians on a Sunday Easter mountain trip - the so-called påsketur - eat Kvikk Lunsj as a small cultural ceremony rather than as a calorie source. International visitors who develop a serious affection for the bar (most do) can stock up at any Norwegian supermarket on the way home.