Welcome to our BLOG. Here you will find the fascinating and interesting weekly activities going on at the Young and Healthy family business. We strive to create the best products at the best possible prices to make them affordable to everyone. The freeze-drying process is very simple to understand but very complex in nature. We will always stick to the simple side of things to explain everything that we do so it is easily understood.
Simply put, we remove 99% of water from our foods without cutting to much of the nutritional value. Freeze-drying is much different than Dehydrating. Through the freeze-drying process, water is removed from the foods due to a constant vacuum application and temperature variation, which allow for the stability with the nutritional values at @ 98%. The temperatures range from -45° to 150° F throughout the process. Dehydrating, on the other hand, applies heat throughout the process which dry’s the food out by evaporating the water which decreases the nutrition value down to @ 60% with the temperature range upwards of 180° F.
Water and moisture content is a big issue with foods today. Foods containing moisture are subject to rot and bacteria. That’s why the Young and Healthy products market is ideal for day-to-day snacks, camping and outdoor activities. Our products contain a water activity level of .3 or below. Foods containing water activity levels above .6 are susceptible to bacteria that could make a person extremely ill. Our fruit bites and meals are packaged fresh and sealed in mylar bags along with an oxygen absorber. The freshness is sealed into our capsule products once encapsulated. By protecting the food from the outside moisture, allows the food to stay fresh for years while sealed.
This week at Young and Healthy, several things going on. New fruit bite batches of Bananas, Cantaloupe, Mango and Honeydew Melon out of the freeze dryers. Red cabbage, cauliflower, and celery going in. (FYI, at a total of 60 pounds, we will end up with about 5 pounds of nutritional powder.) We just received final review from NYS Department of Agriculture for several new products recently submitted for testing to become the newest products of another product line for camping/hiking/survival. So we are very happy and will be uploading those new additions – mild chili and raw powdered eggs. We have had several people try and experiment with both products with great success.
Also, in its final stages of review is a breakthrough product to help enhance sleep quality called Sleep-enZzz… 100% all natural from a specific formula of fruit and vegetables. Amazing! We will hope to be adding that very soon!
Research and development on-going with Brenda. She has been working on bringing a guacamole recipe for camping. Working on a freeze-dried chicken and rice meal and some breakfast ideas.
Simply amazing to take a backpack that usually carried 40 pounds of food to now about 3 pounds of freeze dried products of the same food.
Check back next week to see where we are at.
Thanks for tuning in!