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Comment by ryanar | Hacker News Reader

My feedback, product looks great, packaging looks great. I would not want to buy the Beef & Cheddar. Compare the label of Beef & Cheddar to Turkey & Cinnamon. Turkey & Cinnamon have four simple ingredients, Turkey, Yogurt Powder, Whole Wheat Flour, Cinnamon. Compare that to Beef & Cheddar, there are so many things in that ingredient list by comparison. When I think of food that is 'good for you' I want to see simple ingredients that I can pronounce, no food dyes or additives.

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Thanks for the feedback! All the extra stuff on the B&C comes from the cheddar cheese powder - for the most part they're natural ingredients (excluding things like the yellow color, etc.), but you're right, it doesn't look great.

Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.

Food dehydrators are a fun rabbit hole. Florists use them for wedding bouquets. You will also find a TON of info about scrappily acquiring them on prepper websites. I've seen several posts by Mormon families (food preservation and supply is encouraged by the religion), and a lot of the good ones get into taste, methods for preparing food, and doing it in bulk (which you'd care about). But the se sites will have a large cross with militia and shtf type folks. So conversations will go not where you think sometimes.

I think the most informative one I read was on something like shtf fourms. It stayed tame, other than everyone wanting to buy the dehydrator after the author was done.

Yeah, one of the suppliers I've identified for freeze dried foods is one of those survivalist prepper type stores. I'm sure my use case is not what they're thinking about :)

What size are you looking at?

At the moment I'm buying #10 cans (which are like 3 quarts I believe), though obviously I'll try to scale that up if sales merit it.

That'd be a pretty big dehydrator / freeze dryer to use. I'm I'm guessing at least a 3-1 if not 5-1 ratio on cheese.

Hmm, yeah, that makes sense - I'd still be interested to try it just to understand the process and see how it turns out. Ultimately if this gets big enough I'd want to find a co-packer for production, so it would be good to understand the whole process at a small scale before going that route anyway.

What are "se sites"?

Misspelled. Shtf. Shit hits the fan. Type of prepper who is worried about full failure of society and all services. Stockpiling ammo, guns, plate armor, etc.

As opposed to say someone who keeps a month of food, water, fuel, meds, entertainment on hand, which looks pretty normal now.

Got it, thanks.

They're fun, but high-fat foods like dairy are mostly unsuitable for at home dehydration. Especially at a bulk level. I'm not an expert on nutrition labeling law but OP might have more luck listing "dehydrated cheddar cheese (ingredients, here)" with the ingredients in parenthesis. That signals to the consumer that even though there are a lot of big ingredients they are really just one thing.

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