on June 28, 2026
The quiet decision that changes everything
Most people don't think about how their supplements were preserved. The bottle just shows up. The capsule looks the same as any other. The label promises nutrients.
But every supplement on the shelf has been preserved somehow — and the method matters far more than the marketing suggests.
When a manufacturer turns fresh ingredients into a shelf-stable powder, they have two choices: remove the water with heat, or remove it without heat.
The first option is cheap, fast, and standard. The second is expensive, slow, and almost always avoided. But the second is the only one that keeps the food's nutrition intact.
This is why freeze-drying — done at -40°C, under vacuum — is the difference between a supplement that still resembles food and one that doesn't.
What freeze-drying actually is
Freeze-drying is officially called lyophilization. It's a preservation process that removes water from food (or pharmaceutical products) without ever raising the temperature.
Here's how it works:
Step 1: Deep freeze. The food is frozen rapidly to around -40°C. At this temperature, all the water in the food turns to ice — fast enough that the ice crystals stay small, which protects the cellular structure of the food.
Step 2: Vacuum. The frozen food is placed in a chamber, and air is pumped out until the chamber reaches a near-perfect vacuum.
Step 3: Sublimation. Here's where the science gets interesting. Under that vacuum, the frozen water doesn't melt into a liquid before evaporating. It transforms directly from solid ice into water vapour — a process called sublimation.
Because the food never warms up and the water never becomes liquid, the food's molecular structure stays intact. Nothing is denatured. Nothing is oxidised. Nothing is destroyed by heat.
What's left is the original food — minus the water, but with virtually all of its nutritional content preserved.
Research published in peer-reviewed food science confirms what the chemistry suggests: freeze-drying retains nutrients far better than heat-based methods. The same review identified freeze-drying as "one of the best methods of water removal, with final products of highest quality."
Why heat is the enemy of nutrition
To understand why freeze-drying matters, you have to understand what heat does to vitamins.
Vitamins are delicate molecules. Most of them — particularly the water-soluble B-vitamins, vitamin C, and naturally occurring antioxidants — are easily destroyed by heat. The damage isn't always visible, but it's measurable.
Here's what the scientific literature shows about how heat damages key nutrients:
Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) — Industrial pasteurisation at 85°C has been shown to destroy up to 94% of vitamin B12 in food products. Even brief exposure to cooking temperatures causes meaningful losses.
Folate (vitamin B9) — Heat-sensitive enough that boiling alone can destroy 10-20% of folate content. Higher temperatures cause much more.
Riboflavin (vitamin B2) — Sensitive to both heat and light. Standard pasteurisation degrades it measurably.
Thiamine (vitamin B1) — Among the most heat-labile vitamins. Significant losses begin at temperatures as low as 120-140°C.
Vitamin C — Loses anywhere from 50% to over 90% during typical thermal processing.
CoQ10 and other heat-sensitive bioactive compounds — Degrade rapidly when exposed to standard processing temperatures.
This isn't a marketing claim. It's basic food chemistry. When you apply heat, you damage nutrients. The hotter the temperature, the longer the exposure, the more damage you do.
A supplement that lists "100 mg of B-vitamins per serving" but was processed at 80°C might actually deliver 30-50 mg by the time it reaches you.
How other drying methods compare
Most supplements aren't freeze-dried. Here's what's actually used in the industry:
Spray-drying — The food is sprayed as a fine mist into a chamber heated to 150-220°C. The droplets dry instantly as they fall. Fast and cheap, but the high temperatures destroy heat-sensitive nutrients.
Heat-drying / air-drying — Hot air (typically 50-90°C) is blown over the food until the water evaporates. Slower than spray-drying but still uses heat. B-vitamins, vitamin C, and enzymes don't survive well.
Drum drying — The food is rolled across heated steel drums at 120-170°C. Used commonly for milk powders and some supplement powders. High nutrient loss.
Freeze-drying — The only method that doesn't use heat. Done correctly at -40°C, it preserves nearly the full nutrient profile of the original food.
The cost difference explains why most brands skip freeze-drying. Lyophilization is estimated to be four to ten times more energy-intensive than standard heat-based drying, and the equipment is roughly three times more expensive. A typical commercial freeze-drying cycle takes 24-48 hours; spray-drying takes minutes.
In a competitive industry that optimises for price, the slow, expensive option rarely wins.
Except when nutrition is the entire point of the product.
What the science says about nutrient retention
The numbers, where peer-reviewed studies have measured them, are striking.
Studies comparing freeze-drying to hot-air drying for vitamin C retention found that freeze-drying preserved roughly 63% of the original vitamin C content, while heat-pump drying retained only 25%. The same pattern holds for other heat-sensitive nutrients.
For meat products specifically — which is the most relevant comparison for organ supplements — freeze-drying has long been considered the standard for nutrient preservation. The food science literature repeatedly cites it as the preferred method for foods containing compounds that are thermally sensitive or prone to oxidation.
This is because freeze-drying preserves not just the nutrients themselves, but the surrounding food matrix — the network of fats, proteins, and cofactors that determine how a nutrient is actually absorbed.
Heat-drying damages the matrix. Freeze-drying keeps it intact.
Why -40°C specifically
Different freeze-drying operations use slightly different temperatures. So why -40°C?
The answer comes down to ice crystal size and product quality.
When food is frozen slowly or at warmer temperatures (say, -10°C or -20°C), the water inside the cells forms large ice crystals. These crystals can puncture cell walls, damaging the structure of the food and degrading the final product's quality.
When food is frozen rapidly at -40°C or below, the ice crystals stay much smaller. The cellular structure of the food is preserved. The nutrients remain locked in their natural matrix. And when the water sublimates away under vacuum, the food retains nearly its original molecular architecture.
This is why pharmaceutical freeze-drying — the gold standard for preserving things like vaccines, biologics, and blood plasma — operates at temperatures around -40°C or colder. The same principle applies to food.
Going colder is technically possible but offers diminishing returns. Going warmer compromises quality.
-40°C is the practical sweet spot for preserving nutrient-dense food without damaging its structure.
Why most supplement brands don't use freeze-drying
If freeze-drying is so much better, why isn't it standard?
Three honest reasons:
1. Cost. Freeze-drying equipment costs significantly more than spray-drying or air-drying setups. The energy bill is multiples higher. The capital investment is harder to justify at scale.
2. Time. A spray-drying batch finishes in minutes. A freeze-drying cycle takes 24-48 hours per batch. This is a 100x speed difference. For mass-market supplements producing millions of bottles a month, slow processing isn't an option.
3. Scale. Spray-drying is built for high throughput. Freeze-drying is inherently small-batch. Brands that have raised money and need to ship at scale quickly can't operate this way without restructuring their entire production model.
These aren't moral failings. They're business decisions. Most supplement brands aren't trying to deliver maximum nutrition — they're trying to deliver acceptable nutrition at the lowest possible cost.
That's a fair choice in a competitive market.
But it does mean that if you actually care about preserving the nutritional value of food in your supplements, you have to seek out the brands that chose the slow, expensive path.
How BIOFAL does it
When we set out to make BIOFAL, the preservation question was settled before everything else.
Beef organs are extraordinarily nutrient-dense. They contain methylcobalamin, pre-formed retinol, naturally occurring folate, CoQ10, and dozens of other compounds — many of them heat-sensitive. Spray-drying would have destroyed too much of what makes them valuable. Heat-drying would have done the same, just slower.
So we freeze-dry at -40°C, under vacuum, in small batches.
The process takes considerably longer than industrial alternatives. It costs more. It doesn't scale the way investors usually want.
But the result is whole-food beef organs with their nutritional profile preserved. Methylcobalamin still in its active form. Retinol still ready for absorption. The food matrix intact. The cofactors present. The molecular structure that makes organ meats one of the most nutrient-dense foods on earth — unchanged by processing.
That's what BIOFAL stands for. Slow work, honest food. Made the right way, even when it's not the easy way.
Where to start
If you're rethinking how your supplements are made, the simplest test is the temperature.
Most supplements were heated somewhere in their production process. Most lost nutrients along the way. The numbers on the label might still look impressive, but they don't tell you what survived.
Our Organic Beef Liver is freeze-dried at -40°C from cattle raised on two Latvian organic farms. Lab-tested. EU Organic certified. Hand-crafted in Riga.
For a broader profile across three organs, our Organic Beef Organ Blend combines liver, kidney and heart — all preserved the same way.
For men interested in traditional male vitality nutrition, Organic Beef Testicles & Liver follows the same process.
All three skip the shortcuts that most brands take.
Because real food deserves real preservation.
