Freeze dried food products, especially freeze dried candies, are becoming increasingly popular. If you need to generate nutrition facts for freeze dried products don’t worry - it’s super simple with ReciPal.

See it in action!

What Is Freeze Drying?

In the freeze drying process, moisture is removed from the product through sublimation. The product is frozen, placed in a vacuum chamber, and then heat is gradually applied which turns the ice directly into vapor. Traditionally this process has been used for preservation purposes, extending its shelf life of a product. However, the freeze dried candy trend is more about changing the taste and texture of the product, creating an interesting new twist on something familiar.

Nutrition For Freeze Dried Foods

If you’re building your own recipe, you’ll search for the ingredients in our database, add them to your recipe, and set the appropriate amounts. However, in many cases, people are just freeze drying a single pre-existing product, which means there’s only one ingredient to add.

The great part about freeze drying a pre-existing product is that the nutrition information of that product is likely readily available. In some cases, the product may already exist in the ReciPal database. But if it doesn’t, you can easily create a custom ingredient for it.

💪Pro Tip - If you have an image/pdf of the spec sheet or even just the nutrition label itself you can use our AI image parsing to instantly fill in all the required information to add the ingredient to our database. A spec sheet will always be a better source of information because it contains the unrounded nutritional data. If it’s not available online, reach out to the manufacturer.

Capturing The Effects Of Freeze Drying

Once you’ve got the ingredients of your recipe set up, representing the freeze drying process is simply a matter of entering the final weight. Since freeze drying removes moisture, the weight of your end product will be lighter than the weight of the ingredients that went into it. The amount of moisture in any particular product will determine the potential for weight reduction.

Does Freeze Drying Change Nutrition?

Not exactly. The nutrient content stays the same—but because you're removing water, the food becomes lighter, which makes the nutrients more concentrated by weight.

Example:

• Original product: 100g of candy = 400 calories
• After freeze drying: weighs 90g = still 400 calories
• So 100g of the freeze-dried version = ~444 calories

That's why it's important to update the net weight per package to reflect the finished (freeze-dried) product.

Final Thoughts

Representing freeze drying just requires knowing the difference in weight before and after the process. When freeze drying pre-existing products, it’s often even simpler than other recipes because it will only include a single ingredient.