INTRODUCTION

You've probably heard of freeze drying or even used freeze dried products without knowing it. It's a quite common process to preserve food and produce easily re-hydrated food products for a variety of different uses. Anything from instant coffee and ready-made trekking meals to speciality and superfoods can be produced by freeze drying. Any time very long shelf life, minimal weight and ease of use is a priority, freeze drying is a viable option. It's also free of any additives and preservatives, which makes it an ideal way to preserve natural, organic and health food.

ISN'T ALL DRYING THE SAME? DRY IS DRY, RIGHT?

No. Not by a long shot. Let's start with the basics. Everybody knows what happens when a grape is dried with heat. It becomes a raisin. Raisins are great snacks, but what happens if you try to re-hydrate a raisin? No matter how long you soak a raisin in water, all you get is a swollen raisin. Heat drying process has permanently destroyed the structure of the grape and there's no way of reversing it.

When you freeze dry a grape you won't get a raisin, you'll get a very, very dry grape that still looks like a grape. It weighs next to nothing and contains almost no water, far less than a raisin, but provided that the freeze drying process is done gently enough, the structure of the grape is intact. Dip a freeze-dried grape in water and, lo and behold, you'll have a grape, not a swollen raisin.

As a plus, as excessive heat hasn't been introduced in the drying process, heat-sensitive nutritients are still there.

HOW ANYONE COULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THIS?

To answer this question, we have to go way back in history. Food spoils easily, which isn't exactly a surprise to anyone. Hundreds, even thousands of years ago natives of south and central America found out that if they left food on top of high mountains like Macchu Picchu for an extended period of time, it dried. Extreme cold froze the food solid and low air pressure slowly but surely removed virtually all the water from it. If they waited long enough, even from inside the cells. Dry food, especially potatoes and meat, didn't spoil like fresh do and the first additive-free food preservation process had been invented.

WHAT ABOUT MODERN FREEZE DRYING?

It's basically the same thing. Freezing the food and introducing vacuum is the very same principle. These days we have the luxury of being able to freeze food products fresh, keeping them frozen and using temperature controlled chamber with extreme vacuum to produce virtually any kind of freeze dried food in few short days, even in hours, instead of months.

Energy efficiency is a consideration and while the process requires a fair bit of electricity, freeze dried food can be stored and transported in room temperature, the overall environmental footprint is amazingly small, especially when it's done using sustainable energy sources.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY HIGH TECH?

The short history of modern freeze drying spans a few decades. The most common use is in medical industry, producing medicine and vaccines. Ever since NASA realized that dehydrating food before sending it to space is the ultimate way to preserve food and its nutritients, as well as make it easily rehydrated with even cold water, food industry has looked into the process.

It's the food preservation method of choice for NASA: It's over five decades since man has been in space without freeze dried food and Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's lunch in moon consisted of peaches and bacon, both freeze dried, of course. A small lunch to man. What was state of the art in the 60's is still exactly that now, only more common. An interesting fact is that as long as freeze dried food is protected from moisture, for example in a sealed bag, it can stay fresh and edible for even decades.

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL ABOUT NATUREDRY PROCESS?

In principle, nothing. Anyone with a freeze dryer can produce freeze dried food after a few calibration runs. Just freeze the food, throw it in the chamber, turn on the machine and see what happens. When it's dry enough, congratulations, you've done it.

In practise, a lot. NatureDry is an extremely gentle, multistage freeze drying process that is designed to preserve vitamins, antioxidants and enzymes of fresh, raw berries. It also maintains the shape, colour and texture of fresh berries and, last but not least, leaves only 2-4% of residual water in the berries for extreme, all natural preservation. It's all about a finely tuned balance.

We're not exaggerating one bit when we call NatureDry revolutionary. It's the gold standard of freeze drying.

HOW DID YOU DO IT?

Our research scientist, Dr. Miia Helanto, designed her first freeze drying production line in 2004. While working at Aalto University (former Helsinki University of Technology) laboratory of bioprocess technology she used freeze drying on a regular basis for her doctorate research of lactic acid bacteria. It's safe to say she already was a bona fide expert in freeze drying when we made the decision to start our family firm in 2010.

After setting up a R&D lab, literally in our garage, it didn't take long to realize there's much more to it than we originally expected. First few trial runs resulted in anything but edible results. After months and countless hours of development work, we finally managed to produce the first batch of slightly crumbled but dry bilberries. Boy, were we proud! After we had Aalto University analyze the nutritients, disappointment was not quite the word. Either the berries looked good or nutritients were somewhat intact, but achieving both qualities at the same time seemed virtually impossible. Freeze drying cultivated berries is fairly easy because you can always choose the variety of berries you work with and find the one that dries easily. With wild berries you'll have to use what mother nature gives you and make it work. And we did.

It took us almost three years and 15.000 hours of hard R&D work with Dr. Miia Helanto's expertise in scientific research to finally get the results we wanted. Berries that look nice, taste great, have a perfect crispy texture, long shelf life and - most importantly - as much vitamins, antocyanins, other antioxidants and nutritients of a fresh berry as possible.

In fact, we exceeded our expectations. 94-97% of nutritients are intact and all other goals we set to ourselves were either met or exceeded. Some by a wide margin.

SO YOU CAN DO IT IN LAB. SO WHAT?

Not only in laboratory, but in larger scale as well. In 2012 we started looking for a production scale freeze drying machine, or a complete production line, that would enable us to use and scale up all the hard work we've done with product development. We contacted literally dozens of manufacturers and finally in spring 2013 we found a perfect solution: Parker Freeze Dry, Inc. and their Rapid Fire line of freeze dryers. They were exactly what we were looking for, highly scalable and completely adjustable machines that could do everything we had done with our laboratory machine, and even more.

Not to mention enabling us to produce over a full metric ton of prime quality freeze dried berries every month.

OK. THEY MUST BE EXPENSIVE, THEN.

You might think they are if you only look at price to weight ratio. But as they contain almost no water at all, they weigh next to nothing. One kilogram of our freeze dried bilberries is approximately 10 liters, which translates to one pound being full 1.2 US gallons. For every kilogram we use 6.8kg of fresh 1st class bilberries, that's well over a pound for every three ounces of product. In terms of volume to weight, think popcorn. Still not exactly cheap, but considering that we're talking about hand-picked wild berries from the Arctic Circle, fresh frozen, dried using an environmentally friendly high tech process, without additives of any kind (not even sugar!), calling them the natural health food bargain of all time might not even be exaggeration.

If we used second-grade raw material, didn't pay close attention to the process and hadn't invested years in our research project, our products could be a lot cheaper. But then they wouldn't be that different from common, regular freeze dried berry products.

We like to think them as a luxury anyone can afford, and considering how much they can improve anyone's diet, it might be the most delicious and natural way to do it. As far as food is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this.

WHERE CAN I BUY THESE PRODUCTS?

So far the majority of nordic wild berry exports have gone to high-end superfood market in Japan, China and Korea. They've been exported either fresh or frozen, which has been a logistic nightmare. We've just changed that.

We've been running production since June 2014 and as soon as we can deliver enough berries to wholesale and retail companies, availability is going to improve. If you're in Finland, you should be able to find them in organic, health and speciality food stores this fall. If you can't wait to get your hands on them, we do direct worldwide customer sales by mail order.

Contact us at sales @ joy of north . com (remove all spaces before you do) for more information.