For decades people have been using canning as a way to preserve food, create an emergency food supply, and to make the most out of their gardening efforts. While many of us have canned foods as part of our food storage, there’s now a much better way to preserve food: freeze drying. When compared to canning, freeze drying at home saves time, produces higher quality food, is easier, and allows you to preserve more types of food.

Preserve Nutritional Value, Taste, and Color

Freeze drying is an amazing way to preserve food. Unlike canning, freeze drying causes no damage to the nutritional value of the food being preserved. With the canning process, food can lose over half of its nutritional value. In the event that you need to rely on your food storage, every bit of nutrition is important.

Canned foods also dramatically alter the taste, texture, and flavor of foods. The canning process causes foods to become bland in flavor and mushy in texture. With a freeze dryer, foods maintain their freshness and texture better than with any other food preservation method.

Freeze Drying is Easier and More Reliable

Canning takes a lot of preparation, careful handling, and demands your full attention for long periods of time. Freeze drying is a largely automatic process where you simply load up the freeze dryer and walk away until the process is complete.

Canned foods much be checked often to ensure that they’re still safe to eat, and many times canned foods will spoil well ahead of their expected shelf life due to errors in the canning process or flaws in the jar’s seal. With freeze drying, food stays fresh for up to 25 years without worry.

Storing canned food can be a bit of a burden. Due to the use of glass jars, canned foods are heavy, fragile, and difficult to keep organized over time. Freeze dried foods weigh much less and can be stored in a variety of different containers or bags. It’s much easier to store freeze dried food than canned food.

Better Variety of Foods

Your options are limited when it comes to the types of food you can store through canning. Freeze drying allows you to preserve the foods you enjoy. Everything from complete meals, fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and even herbs are all easy to preserve with a freeze dryer. With a freeze dryer you can also save your leftovers, helping you cut down on food waste.

Due to your limited food options with canning, it can be hard to accommodate special diets or specific nutritional needs. Freeze drying works with any diet, and it’s easy to create a food storage for vegetarians, vegans, people who have food allergies, or for those looking to eat only non-GMO foods.