I remember going to the Science Museum as a kid and eating the astronaut ice cream.

When we take the moisture out of a product, we'd never thaw the product into a water state.

That moisture goes straight from an ice crystal within the product turns directly into a gas.

This machine will collect upwards of 40 pounds of ice.

If you put good stuff in it, good stuff comes out.

You're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing."

You have a full meal in a bag.

We get to be part of people's adventure.

I'm always on the lookout for fun new stuff to freeze dry.

It's one of the funnest things that I've ever done.

The Pacific Northwest is well known for fresh produce, but if you've ever eaten a freeze dried meal, chances are it came from Oregon.

Hello!

Hello.

This is our cooking process.

We're cooking beef stroganoff today.

The way we cook here is just like you would cook at home.

We just do it in a much larger scale.

And instead of doing a little tiny teaspoons and tablespoons.

We measure things in pounds.

What we have over here we're weighing out our sour cream and our lemon juice.

So we get our sour cream, instead of the little 16 ounce tub, we get our sour cream in 30 pound buckets.

Each one of our cooks, just in sour cream alone, uses 3 or 4 of these buckets, but it's the exact same ingredients you get at home.

At this production plant, workers make food that can last for decades.

Our product has a 30 year shelf life.

I've had product that's 45, 47 years old at this point, and the product quality is great.

You know, it meets the standards that we put in place for the longevity objectives that we have.

Freeze drying is a multi-billion dollar global industry, and the biggest player in North America is in the heart of the Willamette Valley.

In the 1960s, Oregon Freeze Dry started out making freeze dried fruits for cereals and MREs: meals ready to eat for the U.S.

military.

After the Vietnam War, leftover MREs at sporting goods stores flew off the shelves from recreational demand.

The masses wanted freeze dried meals to eat out in nature.

Mountain House is known in industry as the brand.

The Coca-Cola of the freeze dried outdoor meals.

If you think about our products, it's been as high as people have gone and as low as people have gone.

So on submarines and in space stations.

It's a pretty cool technology to be able to support all of that.

One batch is about 1,200 pounds.

When we freeze dried that, that can be reduced down to around 30%, which will actually be packaged for our meals.

In total, we're about 225 people across all of our shifts.

We work in freezers.

We work in dry side rooms.

We have to hit critical control points for food safety.

One day we'll work in a -35 degree environment to the next day, pulling a 150 degree cart into the room.

And they're working in a temperature that's much warmer, you know, 80 degrees, than what they were previous days.

Primarily, we'll start with one product and we will cook that throughout the day or across several shifts.

In the packaging side, we'll run multiple lines at the same time.

Modern freeze drying took off in the 20th century, but the technique is much older as one of several ways to store food: drying., salting, canning, pickling, even... Irradiation is a process that can preserve fruit and other kinds of food for long periods by exposing them to radioactive elements.

Freeze drying sounds high tech, but in the Americas it can be traced back to the Incas, who used cold high altitude air to freeze then dry foods like potatoes.

Whether on a mountaintop or in a machine, the freezing temperatures turn water in food into ice crystals.

Then, lowering the air pressure forces the crystals to turn directly to vapor.

The ice never melts.

It's sublimates, leaving the structure, nutrition, and flavor of the food intact.

The result is food that can remain safe to eat for years.

As freeze drying machines become more accessible, small batch producers try their hand.

Our biggest thing is grab-and-go right now.

To be able to snack anywhere with some of the best tasting stuff: fresh fruits, the ice creams.

We do a lot of candies.

Recently we started doing pies.

These freeze dried foods are meant to be eaten right from the bag.

No water needed.

We really want to focus on the lifestyle foods and things that are everyday abundant in your life that can be freeze dried.

We started Glacier Gourmet with the thought of providing snacks to our kids, not knowing, you know, all the ingredients in a store-bought fruit snack or things like that, and knowing that they were having something fresh, while it is freeze dried and shelf stable, but it is a fresh fruit and it's as nutritious as eating it fresh.

Strawberries are my favorite.

A lot of the flavor is more pronounced.

A lot of the water a lot of times that is in this, dilutes some of the flavor, which isn't a bad thing, but when you dehydrate them and freeze dry them, all of the sugars and the flavor just is more readily available for your tongue to, like, taste.

It's pretty cool.

It's just me and my husband doing this.

Maybe later on down the line, we will get some workers in here.

But the nice thing about this is, you know, because we are with our girls, we get to be there all the time with them.

It's not the normal 9 to 5 full time job.

Freeze dried snacks are big with kids.

So what's the next generation of freeze dried meals?

There's these guys who are coming off the trail and they were like, "We just want a cheeseburger."

And I was like, yeah.

When I hike, I just want a cheeseburger too.

So I went home and I was like, how do I make a cheeseburger in a bag?

I'm a chef.

I've been in the food business.

I've been an organic farmer.

Everything comes out looking like a casserole.

So the barbacoa taco is not a taco.

It's a taco casserole.

The chili rellano is not a chili rellano.

It's a chili rellano casserole.

When you rehydrated it, you get this cheese pull, and it's quite amazing.

You want cheese too, huh?

I enjoy freeze drying far more than fine dining.

I think people want to fuel their body with good food, and this is one way to do it.

You can take your whole hike.

You can do your 28 miles, and the shelf stableness is the best because you're not throwing things away.

You're not worrying about dates.

Easy preparation.

Freeze dried food can be fun on trail, but it's also a lifeline for when times get tough.

We provide product to our soldiers in situations where they have nothing else.

When someone is in a distress, you know, they need something quick and easy they can rely on.

If you have people that are going out into the field, whether it's a linesman who's putting electric back together, whether it's someone who's doing search and rescue and they're out there working 20 hours in a day.

People who are fighting fires up here, if you just have a kettle of hot water and one of these meals, they can eat well.

Preppers used to be like a fringe element, right?

Like you'd call somebody like a prepper as like a, you know, they're a weirdo or something, right?

You're prepared?

What are you doing?

You have a bomb shelter full of stuff?

But at this point, I think everybody is a prepper.

You want to have some water and some food, and it's actually being smart to have those things available to you.

Freeze drying is science with a dash of luck, and Oregon producers are experimenting.

Yeah, I tried making barbecue potatoe chips one time.

Oh.

Yes.

Freeze drying thinly sliced potatoes.

That was a fail.

Pizza is something that people have asked for for years and years and years.

Well, a slice of freeze dried pizza doesn't taste good.

I started with French farmer's cheese because it was something that was like, fancy, but put that in there and they came out like hard little bricks.

The most exciting part is just the transformation that the product takes and how it's so good.

It's just been freeze dried.

I had someone call me up the other day, actually.

I was like, "Why are you calling me?"

He's like, "Cause I had the chili rellano for dinner and my wife's out of town, I don't cook."

I was like, "Oh, great!"

And freeze drying can be bigger than food.

Flowers, plants and wedding bouquets.

Slabs of wood.

Document preservation.

There's so many avenues.

And the more creative you get, the further down the rabbit hole you go.

You know, you always want to try something else.

I'm always like, "Oh, what can I preserve today?"

You know, what can I, what can I freeze today?

What would it be like to do this?

Really do anything.

Yeah.

Freeze drying tests what will preserve.

At its forefront, Oregonians will persevere.

Our house grew up on freeze dried eggs, and my kids didn't know what real eggs were until, well beyond what they should have.