Introduction
Freeze-drying isn’t a trend or a gimmick. It’s a scientific process that’s been used in a modern sense for decades in everything from preserving vaccines to feeding astronauts.
Most people will tell you that freeze drying was developed by NASA to make ice cream for astronauts. In fact that isn’t even close to being true and we’ll give you the real story in this post.
At Lynch’s Pantry, we use a commercial freeze-dryer to create everything from crunchy, creative confections made from our handmade sorbet and gelato to shelf-stable specialty grade instant coffee — and people are constantly surprised by how flavourful, light, and weirdly addictive it all is.
If NASA Didn’t Develop Freeze Drying, Who Did?
NASA definitely refined freeze drying techniques in the 1960s as a part of the space food program. However, the first machinery that would be considered as a “modern” freeze-drying apparatus was credited to the French physician, physicist and inventor Jacques Arsène d'Arsonval in 1906.
If this information is surprising, you’ll be gobsmacked to find out that the principles of freeze-drying have been known to and exploited by people as far back as the ancients. The Incas utilised the cold, dry conditions in the Andes to execute a primitive form of freeze-drying to preserve potatoes.
What Exactly Is Freeze Drying Anyhow?
Freeze drying is just the layman’s term, the lab-coat types use the fancier term “lyophilisation”. Whatever you call it, freeze drying is basically a method of preserving products, in our case food, by removing all of the water from it in temperature controlled vacuum conditions.
We are going to write a few more blog articles in the coming weeks. One will really simply explain the science of freeze drying. Another will show you the technology, machinery and processes that we use to make that science work for us at Lynch’s Pantry. For now, we want to focus on why and how we came up with the idea to start doing this at a little family owned café.
Where Did the Idea Start? – Well We All Did Some Crazy Stuff During COVID….Didn’t We?
Everyone came up with some funny ideas during COVID, it was a weird time. After successive waves of lockdowns we started thinking of ways for our customers to get a good coffee at home while taking a little bit of Lynch’s into isolation with them. We started thinking about home brewing but for a heap of reasons that we detailed in a previous blog, home brewing is tricky and never works out the way people hope it will.
We started thinking it would be great if instant coffee didn’t suck so badly. Then after looking into how they make instant coffee we started to realise that there really isn’t any reason that it has to be so terrible. You can check out a previous blog of ours if you want to find out exactly why commercially available instant coffee is such garbage (and how we fixed it).
But what if you approached it with the same level of respect, care and craft that we approached the specialty grade coffee that we serve in our café? Was it possible to produce an instant coffee product that we could be really proud of?
It was very clear to us that if we were ever going to take a run at something like this then freeze-drying capability would be the backbone of the whole thing. There are other, cheaper, faster techniques to dry instant coffee, but all of them involve over-extracting, over-heating and over-processing the coffee, destroying the volatile aromatic compounds that make it what it is. Even if we started with specialty grade beans, if our instant coffee was ever going to be any good then it would have to be freeze-dried.
Then, just like that, the height of the COVID pandemic receded and things started to transition back to normal…..so we thought.
The New Normal - Crisis
Cost of living had been a hot topic in Australia for a long time, but as soon as COVID receded, the economic stimulus packages that the government had enacted to get the economy through the pandemic became a double-edged sword and inflation went through the roof. To try to tackle that, interest rates spiked. At the same time places like Newcastle that were outside of, but in close proximity to major metropolitan areas saw higher than normal population growth because the proliferation of working from home arrangements meant that people could move away from the bigger commercial centers. This exacerbated underlying housing supply issues with plummeting vacancy rates and spiking rents and property prices.
In short, our local customer base were really hurting with both a cost-of-living crisis and a housing crisis that was particularly extreme in our city. They looked after us and as a business we plodded along through it, but we could see the pressure and belt tightening that people were having to do to get by. We wanted to support them, but not passing on the inflating costs that we were experiencing was not a option for us that would have been sustainable.
At some point the instant coffee idea floated back up but from a different angle. We realised that if our ideas worked, we could probably give our customers a really great quality coffee experience for about $1.20 per cup. Doing the math, if our customers drank two coffees a day and substituted one of those café espresso-based coffees for one of our instants. Then they’d still drink nothing but fantastic coffee and save $25-$30 a week.
That was enough for us and with no way to do any testing and ensure the product would work the way we hoped, we took the plunge and invested in freeze drying equipment.
The product did turn out the way we hoped…..and then some. Here's a little video that we made after our first couple of batches. You can tell how stoked Blake is with how it turned out.
Hedging Our Bets – We’re Impulsive But We Aren’t Crazy….We Aren’t…We’ve Been Tested
It does sound like we really threw caution to the wind and went for it there. In a way we did, if the instant coffee didn’t turn out the way we hoped it was a significant investment that we likely going to regret. Having said that, we also wouldn’t have gone for it if we didn’t have any additional ideas to the instant coffee concept.
We’ll discuss these additional innovative ideas in another post because the instant coffee concept really was the main driver. However, we’ve always been about doing things differently here. We want our customers to be perpetually surprised at what they discover at Lynch’s. One of things that grabbed us with freeze-drying as a technique and gave us the confidence to move forward was definitely the way you could create textures and flavours that aren’t possible any other way.
Next Up – Yeh, Well What Else You Got?
Our specialty grade instant coffee concept may well be the coolest thing we’ve ever come up with at Lynch’s (and we’ve done some cool stuff over the years). It was the main reason that we developed a freeze-drying capability but on its own it was just too risky. It wasn’t till we realised what else we could do with the equipment that we had the confidence to move forward. Our next blog will be about that “what else” and how this capability allows us to create some really exciting stuff.