9 Candies to Avoid Freeze Drying (And Why)

Forget the fizzy frenzy of freeze-drying Skittles. I’m here to burst your space-age candy bubble and tell you: some treats just weren’t born for the frosty void.

We’ll go over why certain treats aren’t going to change when put inside a freeze dryer.

It is important to note that when we say the candy doesn’t freeze dry, it generally means nothing will happen when you freeze dry it. Some of these candies will just end up as a harder or more brittle version.

3 Reasons Why Candy Won’t Freeze Dry

Too much moisture. When the water weight is too high, the freeze drying process won’t work correctly.

and conversely…

Not enough moisture. Surprising how the opposite can be true as well.

Contains high amount of oil/fats. Unfortunately, this means chocolate won’t be able to freeze dry. Oil doesn’t subliminate (“evaporate”) away as water does.

Don’t Freeze Dry These Common Candy Ingredients

Chocolate – Cannot be freeze-dried effectively due to its high fat content, which can lead to rancidity and texture changes during the process. Some “chocolate-flavored” candy bars may work such as 3 Musketeers or Snickers.

Peanut Butter – Similar to pure chocolate, peanut butter contain too much fats and practically no moisture in the form of water. Freeze drying peanut butter will have zero effect. There are plenty of peanut butter flavored candies or sweets that could work.

Jelly Beans – Because the moisture content is so low to begin with, nothing much will happen to jelly beans except they’ll get a little harder and have more of a “crumble” quality to them.

Honey – It doesn’t make much sense to freeze dry honey as it already has such a stable shelf-life. 

Syrups - Similar to honey, the liquid content is too high and cannot be freeze-dried like other common candies. 

Jelly or Jam – Jelly/jam shares the same kind of problem as honey and syrups. Putting these high liquid content sweets through the freeze-drying process will have no effect.

Oreo Cookies – The two cookies already have no moisture so there will be no effect. The cream in the middle is made with vegetable oil so that’s a no-go as well.

Sour Patch Kids – Even Sour Patch Kids? For some reason, these gummies will not freeze dry properly. The texture remains the same. It may have something to do with the ingredients.

Swedish Fish – Similar to the Sour Patch Kids, nothing will happen to the popular red fish candies. Even after multiple test batches of 5+ hours, there’s simply no effect.

Before You Go

If you’re interested in learning how to start freeze drying candy, we have a written guide on what it takes to start.

Candy sells quite easily on social media, especially Tiktok so join the freeze-drying candy trend!