The equipment is the easy part. What decides whether a freeze-dried food business works is your local cottage food law, your costing, and whether you can run a machine hard enough to meet demand without destroying it.
Start with the law, not the machine
Rules on selling home-produced food vary enormously by country, state and even county. Some jurisdictions permit shelf-stable home-produced food with registration and labelling; others require a licensed commercial kitchen for anything sold to the public. Freeze-dried candy has been a particular grey area because the process changes the product without cooking it.
Find out what applies to you before you spend anything. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice — but a phone call to your local food safety authority costs nothing and is the single highest-value hour in the whole plan.
Costing, properly
Most people who price freeze-dried products get it wrong by ignoring the cycle. Work per batch, not per bag.
| Cost line | Per 20-hour cycle |
|---|---|
| Electricity (1,080W avg at $0.28/kWh) | ~$6.05 |
| Packaging (10 gallon bags with absorbers) | ~$7.20 |
| Pump oil, amortised | ~$1.50 |
| Raw ingredients | Yours to fill in |
| Labour: prep, load, seal, label | Yours to fill in |
| Machine depreciation over 5 years | ~$1.65 per cycle on a $2,995 unit at 1 cycle/day |
The line people forget is labour. Slicing, loading, sealing and labelling a batch is an hour or more of your time, and if you are not paying yourself for it, the business is not profitable — it is a hobby that recovers its consumables.
Scaling: when one machine is not enough
A single home machine gives you roughly one cycle a day, which is 10 to 15 lb of fresh food in and a few pounds finished. That is a farmers market, not a wholesale account.
The decision point is duty cycle rather than capacity. Home machines are built for intermittent use; running one back to back every day for a year is outside what they were designed for, and pump wear accelerates. Options, in order of cost: a second home machine for redundancy, a seven-shelf model for more tray area in the same footprint, or a commercial unit on a 240V circuit built for continuous duty.
- Two home machines beat one bigger one for redundancy — when one is down you are still trading.
- Seven-shelf models buy tray area cheaply if floor space is your constraint.
- Commercial units need electrical work. Budget for an electrician before you budget for the machine.
Packaging for retail
Retail packaging is a different problem from storage. You need a bag that survives handling, a label that meets your local requirements — typically ingredients, allergens, net weight, business name and address, and a date — and something a customer can see the product through, which fights against mylar being opaque. Clear-fronted mylar pouches are the usual compromise, at a shorter shelf life than fully opaque bags.
The honest warning
Freeze-dried candy businesses have had a boom, and a lot of them closed within a year. The ones that lasted priced their labour in, sorted their food licensing first, and had a second machine before they had a wholesale order.