NCFU researchers are working on a technology to obtain dry foods while preserving their major nutrition value. The technology has long been used in the area for dairy products, now it is turn for fruit and vegetables.

– The public projects aimed at supporting agriculture are now yielding their fruit – it took just a few years to expand the range of nationally produced foods you can see in shops. Enhancing Russia’s independence in terms of food supply will take advanced technologies, and NCFU’s experts are working on it, while in cooperation with their industrial partners, – Prof. Dmitry Bespalov (Rector, NCFU) was quoted as saying.

Sublimation, as a technology, has been known since the 1940s, and such foods were used by astronauts and those travelling to explore Arctic. However, in the late 1990s the technology was nearly abandoned due to its high cost.

Now NCFU has decided to bring it back making it more affordable and productive, and this is part of the Science and Universities National Project.

The specific point about the freeze-drying technology developed at NCFU is that water is removed from fresh fruit and vegetables at 40-45 °C down to the cellular level, with the dried product to contain no more than 4-6% of residual moisture – this almost completely excludes any significant change in its physical-chemical properties and microbiology. 100 kg of apples, for instance, once processed, will weigh no more than 20 kg, and then it can be stored, packed duly, at room temperature for several years in almost any storage room designed for food.

Sublimation has proven good for not fruit only and can be applied to other foods.

– Sublimation can be used when processing the most valuable elements of milk – whey proteins, preserving them in the most natural way. Our development is the first one in Russia, which has been set into operation on the industrial scale, – Dmitry Mamai (research team member, Associate Prof., Dept for Food Technologies & Engineering, NCFU) noted.

Now the research results have attracted business people, while NCFU obtained a respective patent (Method of Obtaining Dry Whey Product, #2717971, 2020), and experimental studies are underway.

The next stage is to improve and set into industrial operation sublimation-based drying method for fruit and vegetables.