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Nyle Systems helps entrepreneurs turn their food ideas into high-quality products sold in stores around the country. An example is Peaceful Fruits, a maker of healthy organic fruit snacks based in northeast Ohio. Peaceful Fruits uses a Nyle Systems FD-24 to convert small batches of blended fruit purees into chewy fruit strips with the ideal moisture content for a chewy texture and delicious flavor.
Turning a gooey, liquid slurry of fruit into perfectly chewy snacks isn’t easy, and each of the 9 flavors that Peaceful Fruits offers has different ingredients. That means theres a wide variety of recipe characteristics to take into account when perfecting drying curve recipes that are a careful balance of temperature, relative humidity, airflow and dwell time in the drying chamber.
Peaceful Fruit’s tagline is “Just Fruits”, which has two meanings. “We make fruit snacks out of real fruit,” says founder Evan Delahanty, an adventurer and philanthropist that began creating the snacks in his mother’s kitchen before scaling up to a Nyle dryer a couple years ago. “No concentrates, no sugars, no corn syrups – we take whole organic fruit, blend it and then slow dry it overnight to make an authentic fruit snack,” adds Delahanty.
The second meaning pertains to the company’s respected status as a Certified B Corporation, a for-profit social enterprise. Peaceful Fruits partners with communities in the USA and abroad to create what Delahanty refers to as an economic, environmental and socially sustainable product. The company sources much of the fruit for its snacks from sustainable harvesters in the Amazon rainforest, and it employs more than 2 dozen adults with developmental disabilities in its hometown of Akron, Ohio, to process, package and ship product.
Nyle Dryer’s Automated Controls and Data Log are Favorite Features
When asked about his favorite Nyle dryer feature, Delahanty responded that he loves the automated controls and the continuous data log that provide constant awareness of what’s happening in the dryer. “If something goes awry, those control features provide the info we need to quickly make adjustments,” said Delahanty. “The data log is great for assessing challenges that flair up due to a variety of variables. For example, a change in quality was noted recently and we were able to pinpoint the problem after reviewing drying curves and relative humidity data, Delahanty noted. “It had nothing to do with the system, we learned it was a fruit supplier switch that led to a change in the drying dynamic for that recipe.”
