-
Could you please provide insights on the quality issues that solar-dried food products may encounter? Additionally, what measures can be taken to address such challenges?
Usually, aflatoxins are produced by fungal actions during harvest, storage and processing of food crops when they are exposed to warm and humid conditions during sun drying. But during the processing of our solar drying, we keep produce at most care to avoid these conditions where fungal growth is possible. The dryers at the farm are cleaned before every batch production. The commodities are dried to keep moisture upto 10-12% in every product. So that the growth of fungus is not possible. After the dried product arrives at the collection center before packaging, the product gets UV sterilized to destroy any kind of microbial contamination in the product. Before dispatching also the dried product was exposed to UV radiation. The storage is done in cold storage so that the humid and warm conditions for fungus can be avoided. -
How do you ensure hygiene is maintained at the farm level?
We provide training to the farmers for maintaining all the hygiene protocols as per the food standards and also at every unit we have a ground person involved for supervision. Along with this at collection centers we are doing sorting and grading of the products and also UV sterilization to reassure hygiene of the products. This process is repeated while the products are at dispatching centres. This repeated sorting, grading and sterilization helps to maintain the hygiene protocols.
Looking at the market prices of tomato @INR 100 per kg. I could remember, how our raheja solar dryer have helped farmers to preserve tomato during lockdown and sell when the market repoens.
@Sagar_Gudekote
Dear Varun
There are a lot of dried products in the market - garlic, ginger, onion, tomatoes etc. How are these currently being dried? How does the processing done with your product compare versus these in terms of economics, nutrition, time, labor, inventory etc.? Could you please elaborate a bit, curious to understand.
Hello @Sydney, I am happy that you asked this question.
The hard truth of today’s time is that what we are eating in daily routine is ultra processed food. When any product is processed too much or cook fast, we lose all the nutrients and at the end we are just having carbon. A food without nutrients is waste and the same thing is happening with existing available dried products which are dried in electric dryer or spray dryer in just couple of hours at high temperature.
Whereas solar dried products are slow food, drying take couple of days at constant low temperature. It allows products to retain the natural colour, taste, fragrance and nutrients. I am attaching our dried mango picture, in the same color and fragrance enzymes still remain active.
Dear Varun
Thank you for the reply. Makes sense, similar to why cold-pressed oils are better than refined oils.
Could you please provide some comparison with the electric/spray dryer (conventional methods) versus the solar dryer you have in terms of economics? Also, as far as I understand, there is nothing proprietary about solar drying technology and anyone can copy this with impunity?
Hello Sydney, May I have your email address where I can share unit economics?
Yes, you are right, nothing is proprietary on solar drying, it uses greenhouse principle to dehydrate the products.
But the service that is proprietary is how do you dry the products and that’s where we are working on technology to implement it without much human intervention. The higher the quality of dried products is, higher the price you can command in the market.
For ex, for the dried mango above without sugar and preservative with the product dried at farm level, intact all the freshness of the farm fresh mango. People are ready to pay more than double for the healthy and natural alternative.
Hi Varun,
We have started with a solar dryer but had to shift to electrical dehydration due to few concerns. Can you help answer these few questions please, willing to try out solar for our future needs.
- How do you measure final moisture content and adjust for moisture gain across the chain ?
- Can we achieve a final moisture of 5-7 percent as I feel 10-12 percent is quite high and may lead to microbial growth ?
- Is there a provision to incorporate methods like blanching as it can help decrease enzyme activity needed to help reduce rapid changes in colour, flavour and nutritive value and help increase shelf life.
@Keerthi Thank you for the information. I have seen many people who switched from solar to electric, as solar dryer were never researched more on efficiency that they deserve.
We have been doing R&D on solar dryer performance since last 5 years and as we are also buying back the product, noone can give better feedback than us. Coming to your questions:
-
We have setup local collection centres near to our high penetrated states where we have many solar dryers. We do have setup moisture measuring equipment there to check it and share feedback to farmer entrepreneur next day to improve their drying.
-
Yes, with better efficient dryer. You can do that, at our collection centre we do dehydration again to reduce the moisture as per our b2b client requirement.
-
We don’t prefer blanching because you lose all the nutrition and flavors while blanching with sugar and water. To stop enzymatic process and kill micro bacteria, we do use UV sterilization at collection centre. We have also developed small UV chambers for farmer entrepreneur who want to sell their products locally.
I hope I have answered your questions.