Dried Foods
Boosting Drying Efficiency With Pulsed Electric Field
In the competitive world of food processing, optimizing drying operations is more than just a technical challenge—it’s a business priority
2025-09-24
Manufacturing Dehydrated potato products—such as flakes and powders—comes with its own set of complexities. Traditional methods struggle with inefficiency, inconsistent drying, and loss of quality.
OptiCept’s CEPT® technology, based on Pulsed Electric Field, offers a solution with lab-proven results demonstrating major improvements.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how PEF reduced the drying time of potato products.
Potato dehydration processors face a range of challenges tied to efficiency, quality, and cost.
One of the biggest issues is the energy-intensive blanching step, which adds high operational cost while risking over-softening or leaching nutrients and color.
Processors also struggle with long drying times, limiting throughput and increasing energy consumption, especially as demand for potato flakes and powders grows.
Maintaining consistent product quality—uniform color, texture, and rehydration performance—can be difficult, particularly when raw material variability is high.
Additionally, issues include equipment bottlenecks, high maintenance needs, yield losses due to thermal damage, and the challenge of improving sustainability metrics without compromising performance.
Together, these factors make production expensive, energy-heavy, and difficult to scale efficiently.
PEF works by creating microscopic pores in the cell membranes through short, high-voltage pulses—a process known as electroporation. It’s a non-thermal method that enhances water release during drying, enabling:
This method, of course, not only applies when dehydrating potatoes. PEF can be applied in a wide range of dehydration processes, including onions, carrots, asparagus, pineapple, mangoE more.
The trial using the Folva variety showed that applying PEF in potato dehydration led to:
By using the OPTICEPT® SD7 PEF system, producers of dehydrated potato products can expect:
OPTICEPT® SD7 is the next-generation PEF system. Specifically engineered for optimizing the dehydration of fruits and vegetables. The OPTICEPT® SD7 PEF system is installed and retrofitted into existing production lines right after the preprocessing (sorting, washing) and before steam washing, cutting, and drying. The system has a very small footprint and fits into most processing lines.
As mentioned, the method can be applied in a wide range of commodities, from pineapple e mango to carrots e cranberries.
Contact OptiCept today, and let’s discuss how we could help you in your dehydration process.
In the competitive world of food processing, optimizing drying operations is more than just a technical challenge—it’s a business priority
In November 2024, a prominent food manufacturing company headquartered in the European Union made a decisive move toward production optimization by implementing the state-of-the-art OPTICEPT® SD7 Pulsed Electric Field (PEF) system.
PEF treatment significantly improves mango drying by speeding up moisture removal, reducing energy use, and shortening overall drying time.
