Calbee piloting dehydration technology for faster snack turnaround time

Calbee has entered a Technology Evaluation and License Option Agreement (TELOA) to exclusively evaluate several snack food applications at EnWave’s facilities in Canada using lab-scale Radiant Energy Vaccum (REV) technology.

REV is a proprietary method for the precise dehydration of organic materials that is faster and cheaper than freeze-drying with better product quality than air-drying or spray drying.

Calbee plans to conduct intense product development in 2019 and launch several iterations through test marketing efforts in 2020.

Scale-up

If Calbee’s products resonate with Japanese consumers, the snack, confectionery, bakery and cereal producer intends to scale-up production to a larger, continuous REV processing line in 2021.

This is the first TELOA signed by Vancouver-based EnWave with a Japanese food manufacturing company and represents an important milestone for the company.

REV is swiftly catching interest across several market verticals in the food and pharmaceutical sectors. EnWave’s strategy is to sign royalty-bearing commercial licenses with industry leaders in multiple verticals for the use of REV technology. To-date, it has signed over 20 licenses.

EnWave currently has three commercial REV platforms:

nutraREV: to dry food products quickly and at low-cost, while maintaining high levels of nutrition, taste, texture and color;

powderREV: used for bulk dehydration of food cultures, probiotics and fine biochemicals such as enzymes below the freezing point;

quantaREV: used for continuous, high-volume low-temperature drying.

An additional platform, freezeREV, is being developed as a new method to stabilize and dehydrate biopharmaceuticals such as vaccines and antibodies.