5. Conclusion

Recently introduced as a vacuum dehydration technique at low or medium temperature (between – 20 and 60°C), zeodration, whose process is similar to freeze-drying, is still not widely used in the food industry. This very gentle drying operation generates little qualitative alteration in the dehydrated material. What's more, this technique remains highly competitive in economic terms, compared with freeze-drying (30-50% reduction in production costs). In fact, it takes less than 3 kWh on average to extract 1 liter of water (compared with around 5 kWh for freeze-drying), and equipment maintenance is very low.