Dry4Good scales ambient ingredient drying capacity

French ingredient processor Dry4Good is preparing a substantial increase in production after securing €5m to expand its drying operation at Cergy, near Paris.

Two additional production lines will raise annual capacity from approximately 50 tonnes to 800 tonnes, while around 10 new jobs are expected as the business moves towards larger commercial programmes.

Dry4Good converts fruits, vegetables, spices, mushrooms, and aromatic plants into powders, granules, and inclusions used in bakery, confectionery, beverages, seasonings, prepared foods, and other manufactured products.

Its process operates at ambient temperature rather than relying on conventional high-temperature dehydration. The technology is intended to retain more of the raw material’s original colour, flavour, texture, and nutritional characteristics while producing a shelf-stable dry ingredient.

Funding is led by the Île-de-France Reindustrialisation Fund, which is financed by the regional government with support from the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Innovacom and Turenne Groupe. Food-industry investors are also participating.

Established in 2019, Dry4Good opened its first industrial site at Cergy-Pontoise in 2022. The 1,000m² operation received more than €4m of initial investment and was equipped with three production lines, providing the base for the forthcoming expansion.

The business works with farmers and cooperatives to process seasonal crops and produce that falls outside visual retail specifications. Converting suitable material into powders and inclusions can extend availability beyond the harvest window while creating an additional outlet for crops that retain their functional and sensory quality.

Romaric Janssen, co-founder of Dry4Good, said: “One of the industry’s longstanding challenges has been finding dry ingredients that can truly reproduce the sensory experience of fresh products. Our technology allows manufacturers to use ingredients that deliver authentic flavour and colour while helping them move away from artificial additives and highly processed formulations.”

Expanding annual capacity sixteenfold will require the company to preserve that sensory proposition while controlling the variation inherent in agricultural raw materials. Moisture, maturity, cultivar, storage history, particle size, and solids content can all affect the behaviour of a drying process.

Scale introduces tighter process demands

Moving from development quantities to routine industrial supply changes the way each batch must be managed. Preparation, cut size, loading, air movement, processing time, endpoint moisture, milling, sieving, and packaging must remain consistent across more lines, operators, and production campaigns.

Fresh produce varies with growing conditions and harvest date, even where it comes from the same farm. Those differences affect drying time, powder yield, colour, flavour intensity, water activity, and the way a finished ingredient behaves in another manufacturer’s process.

Customers require repeatability that the raw material does not naturally provide. Powders must disperse or dissolve as intended, inclusions must tolerate baking or further processing, and particle size has to remain sufficiently consistent for dosing, blending, and package filling.

Ambient processing may reduce thermal damage, but it does not remove microbiological risk. Incoming-material controls, hygienic zoning, cleaning validation, environmental monitoring, allergen segregation, pest management, and foreign-body prevention become more demanding as throughput and the number of ingredient families increase.

Water activity and final moisture need particularly close control because a dry ingredient can remain microbiologically vulnerable without supporting visible spoilage. Specifications should connect those measurements with storage temperature, pack barrier, expected shelf life, and the intended use of the ingredient.

Traceability must link every finished lot to its grower or supplier, incoming condition, preparation steps, processing line, operating settings, test results, and packaging batch. Produce rejected from fresh retail specifications still requires the same evidence of safety and storage integrity as cosmetically standard material.

Application support will become more important as larger customers adopt the ingredients. A fruit or vegetable powder may replace an artificial colour, flavour, particulate, or combination of additives, yet it can also alter acidity, viscosity, water binding, texture, sedimentation, and shelf life.

Dalziel Ingredients has expanded along a similar service-led route, with its acquisition by Peak Rock reflecting the value of formulation and application capability alongside seasonings, coatings, bakery blends, sauces, and prepared-food systems.

Commercial production also places greater weight on supply continuity. Seasonal crops can create short periods of high intake followed by long manufacturing programmes based on stored material, so capacity planning must connect farm deliveries, intermediate storage, drying schedules, and customer forecasts.

The planned lines will give Dry4Good room to supply larger brands and manufacturing sites, but qualification processes can be lengthy. Customers may require pilot trials, factory validation, sensory work, shelf-life studies, allergen reviews, nutritional analysis, and confirmation that the ingredient remains consistent across more than one harvest.

Natural powders continue to attract interest as manufacturers simplify labels and seek stronger colour and flavour from recognisable sources. Their success in large-scale production depends less on the appeal of a development sample than on whether each delivery performs within the same operational limits.

Dry4Good’s expansion will test that transition directly. The process must preserve the qualities associated with fresh material while meeting the less visible requirements of specifications, sanitation, throughput, documentation, and dependable delivery.