How Dehydrators Affect Food Nutrients

Have you noticed how light and crunchy our nuts are? It’s because we use the BEST kind of dehydrator!

Our heat pump dehydration method produces a higher quality food that isn’t exposed to the same potential pollution as electric coil dehydrators.

Most dehydrators, both commercial and residential, work by heating ambient air over an electrical coil and blasting it over the ingredients. There are several health and environmental problems with this type of equipment which people should be aware of.

Pollutants

Coil-driven dehydrators heat, pulls in and discards thousands of litres of ambient air per minute. The World Health Organisation defines ambient air pollution as potentially harmful pollutants emitted by industries, households, cars, and trucks. Given that many nuts need 24 or more hours to dehydrate, the user is essentially exposing your food to the most amount of pollution possible. This is even more of a concern if the company, as most are, is located in an industrial area where ambient air can have higher levels of pollution. Fortunately the heat-pump derived technology that we use, recycles the same air in a closed-loop, simply picking up moisture (evaporating) and dumping it (condensing) over the hot and cold components within a heat pump.

Energy Intensive

Electric coil dehydrators use the most amount of energy needed to heat air. Which is poor form in this carbon-sensitive world we live in. The heat pump technology we use at Mindful Foods is based on the same technology that drives a refrigerator and is between 300% and 400% more energy efficient than electric coil dehydrators.