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Why feed freeze-dried foods?

As we all know, we need to feed our birds vegetables and some fruit as part of a complete healthy diet. While some birds take to new fruit and vegetables without any problems, all the birds I've taken in were picky eaters. For example, my budgie Lemmy loves spinach but will not even look at any other type of fruit or vegetable. Higgins the african grey loves corn on a cob, but hates anything juicy or remotely wet. Oscar, the corella who is 43 years old and has eaten nothing but seeds before he came to us, is genuinely terrified of vegetables.

I have tried making fresh chop and I have tried making frozen chop. It's quite hard to balance the small amount you need to feed (usually recommended as 10-20% of the total diet) with the minimum you can buy (half a cauliflower or a carrot). Fresh chop, even made in smallest amounts, seems so wasteful - you buy a carrot and blitz it with a capsicum and that's still too much food for even three birds, the rest is thrown away. Or, if frozen, it comes out of the freezer a bit degraded and soggy.

It takes a really long time to get birds to get used to new things, particularly new foods. It took us three months to get Oscar to eat pellets.

Feeding freeze-drying veges and fruit to parrots is popular overseas, and I first ordered some freeze-dried bird chop from an American website, but as you can imagine it took a while to get delivered and very expensive. So having seen that it's a product that would be useful for my own birds, I have invested in a freeze-dryer (which was also sent from America and took six months to arrive) and then tried various combinations of fruit and veges. Now I am ready to share these products with you.

Freeze-drying gives the convenience of fruit and vegetables being on hand saving you time and reducing waste. You can easily control the amount you give them, for example, just one floret of a cauliflower without having to buy and cook a whole cauliflower.

The concentrated flavours and crunchy taste of freeze-dried food may even help with getting them to eat it.

Do get in touch and let me know what you think. I hope you love this locally made product as much as we do.

  • Fresh cooked broccoli

  • Freeze-dried broccoli

  • Fresh cooked cauliflower

  • Freeze-dried cauliflower

Feeding Instructions

Because the vegetables are airy and crunchy, they can be fun for the birds to eat as is and can be offered as a treat.

Some birds may prefer it broken up finer and sprinkled on their existing pellets.

You can also rehydrate the vegies by adding a very small amount of water to them and leaving it for about half an hour.

What is freeze-drying?

A freeze dryer removes water from food in order to preserve it. It is different from dehydrating and drying in that the food is first rapidly frozen and then the frozen water is evaporated under vacuum. Think of raisins and dried apricots - they shrivel up and are still a bit chewy. In contrast, freeze-dried vegetables are crunchy, airy, and retain their original size and shape. This means that freeze drying retains most of the nutritional value of the food while condensing the flavour and extending the food shelf life.

A consumer freeze-dryer is still a big and expensive piece of machinery (52 kg, several thousand dollars), and it is rather loud when it's going. One batch of freeze-drying usually takes anywhere from 20 to 40 hours to complete.

You will see there are many companies in New Zealand that sell freeze-dried food for humans (usually popular with hikers as it's so lightweight) and for dogs and cats. Some companies also specialise in various cocktail sprinkles and baking ingredients (such as freeze-dried raspberries). You may have also seen the latest craze of freeze-dried lollies.

I am hoping we are the first in New Zealand to make freeze-dried products for pet birds!

Storage

Ordinarily freeze-drying allows for up to 25 years shelf life if the packet is unopened and is vacuum-sealed or has an oxygen absorber.

The fruit and vegetables are packed in sealed Mylar bags which help preserve the shelf life of the product until it arrives to you. You can transfer the food into another container or use the bag ziploc to reseal it.

The bags are packed with an oxygen absorber packet. Make sure no one tries to eat it! Oxygen absorber reacts with the oxygen in the packet and releases nitrogen. Because the oxygen is removed, there can be no bacterial growth and oxidation. As long as the bag is sealed and re-sealed, the absorber keeps working. Once the oxygen absorber packet has become rock-hard, it's been used up - the chemical reaction has finished and will not be able to absorb any more oxygen.

When the vegies are becoming soft, it means they've absorbed some moisture from the air and this means they should be used up soon.

How do we prepare the food?

We purchase vegetables and fruit at the Lower Hutt food market or a local supermarket.

We wash all the fresh vegetables, chop them into pieces, cook them in boiling water (blanch), and then freeze-dry. Fresh fruit is washed and then chopped, and then freeze-dried. Frozen fruit or vegetables are freeze-dried from frozen.

The dried food is stored in vacuum sealed containers or mason jars with oxygen absorbers until we pack your parcel to ship to you.