Freeze dryers for sale

Hate to be a wet blanket about this... however...
Unfortunately..... Pretty much all the feed back I have seen says home units are not a good investment..

They are expensive...
They don't have a very long running life before quiet expensive service is needed..
Parts are expensive... IF you can get them.. Customer service is not good..

There is bound to be a certain amount of "user error" on the part of machine owners..
Unfortunately just too much bad feed back makes me think it is much more than "user error"...

If you have one and have had good luck with it.. Good for you.. Otherwise we have chose to not consider that option any more..
Good luck...

That's disappointing to hear. I had heard something about customer service being a bit average too, but my experience emailing them was ok. That being said I wasn't in a rush for reply times. I wasn't after parts or servicing or anything like that so I didn't really pay attention to how long it took to hear back from them.

Thanks for the feedback Tim! It's good to have something like that before sinking the price of a small used car into a machine that might be a lemon out of the box.

Beno In my searches I've found a few companies that do bulk freeze drying in Aus. Forager Fruits in Tazzie do larger bags for a decent price, depending on what you're buying. But it seems they're the mob that make the Camper's Pantry ranges of freeze dried meals. You can get a 24 hour meal pack from them for $30 each which seems pretty damn reasonable given what's in them, and the cost/upkeep of the machinery. Those ones are in limited stock though, so I'm assuming that it was overstock and for the Camper's Pantry folks and once they're gone that's it.


Now I'm not really after meal packs as such, but they do individual bags of products like fruits and vegetables as well. A few things are sold out and would probably require a keen eye to get in your basket but there's a few products that have my interest. I'm gong to keep searching for companies that do that sort of thing (man I wish we could by Augason Farms stuff here without the price gouge!) because it seems crazy that we have no way to get products like that in bulk and at decent prices given we're a country of natural disasters *chuckle*.

Happy to be proven wrong if someone knows a great company though!

I garden each season so food storage is a big part of that. Of course I learned to can pretty effectively but the heat from home canning definitely changes the texture and the shelf life of foods isn’t very long term. I also have a large pantry of store bought canned goods that get rotated routinely. Many of the cans get donated to the local food bank when they get past the time I feel is fresh enough. Being a prepper I wanted another option for for storage so looked into freeze drying. From everything I’ve read freeze dried is by far the best food preservation, both for taste and for shelf life. So I did what I usually do and read everything I could on the home units. From everything I learned I decided to pass on buying one. I don’t mind when there are one or two negative articles or reviews on something but when there is a high percentage of bad reviews I take notice. As stated above the customer service after the sale tends to be less than stellar. The maintenance and lifespan of the machines isn’t fantastic either. I don’t mind paying a lot of money for something as important as safe food preservation but the value just didn’t add up for me on these. When I looked at buying the #10 cans of freeze dried foods from the major suppliers I quickly realized I couldn’t make my own stores for the cost. I ended up getting a year plus supply of a wide variety of cans. I never plan to eat them, and hope I never will honestly. What I did like was they have a longer shelf life than I do with no rotation worries at all. They are my true shtf emergency backup. I have enough fruit trees here along with the gardens to produce more food than I could eat and preserve most years so the freeze dried supplies would hopefully just supplement during bad growing seasons. (Which definitely do happen sometimes). I haven’t looked into finding a place that will freeze dry your own produce. That honestly seems to be the best possible solution if it is a possibility near you.

That's super helpful, thanks Tim! I'll go through it later. I don't doubt your comments at all though, they seem to echo what a lot of folks have been saying. I was willing to overlook it because people are far more likely to complain than not but at the end of the day if it's a resounding 'noooooooo!' I'm inclined to go with that.