Fruit Reimagined

Mar 8, 2025 by Chef David

By Chef David

There is no question – eating fruit is healthy. Fruit provides essential vitamins, nutrients, and fiber, but eating the recommended amount of fruit can be difficult. The American Heart Association recommends four to five servings each of fruits and vegetables daily. Fortunately, there are organic kosher dried fruit shelf-stable options that simplify it – Natierra makes freeze-dried fruits (certified by the OU), Rind is eaten with its rind on (certified by Star K), and Eden sells naturally sweetened dried fruit (certified by Star K).

Each brand has a unique mouthfeel and presentation, recreating fruit in ways that you never imagined.

Eat the Peel

Rind is upcycled dried fruit, made of thin-sliced fruit cut with their skin on. During dehydration, the colors and flavors change creating shriveled fruit chips but maintaining their nutritional content. Serving fruit in its peel adds nutrition and reduces waste. The peel provides additional vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants, and gives Rind its distinctive texture.

Read the ingredients label – traditional Rind contains only fruits, nothing extra. Straw-Peary contains strawberries, bosc pear, and red apples – that’s it. It contains no preservatives, additives, or sugar. (The label even includes the country where each fruit was sourced). The flavor is from the fruit itself.

Their catchphrase, ‘Keep it Real, Eat the Peel’ says it all.

The Full-Fruit Experience

A half-cup serving has approximately 130 calories and provides 18 – 25% RDA of dietary fiber, and 2 grams of protein. Vitamins vary based on the fruits used, although most provide vitamin C, potassium, and calcium.

We also tried Rind Remix, which combines fruit and nuts into an elevated trail mix. For example: Cocoa Berry contains dark cocoa almonds, dried blueberries, and strawberries. Like all their products, it is sugar-free, gluten-free, vegan and delicious. [Although the ingredients are more complex]

Our Thoughts

One of our favorites was The Tropical which contains pineapple (which did not include the skin and was particularly flavorful), orange, and kiwi, and is high in fiber.  We also enjoyed Orchard, which is a mixture of persimmon, peach, and apple, and Straw-Peary (sweet strawberry, red apple, and bosh pear). Apple Chips were a surprising hit. These crisp chips packed a flavorful crunch and provided 4% fiber and 2% iron.

Rind also sells Toasted Coconut Ginger Granola, which is certified kosher dairy by the Kuf K, and although we did not try it, it sounds incredible.

The History of Rind – Matt Weiss, Founder credits his Great Grandma Helen Seitner as the mastermind behind Rind. She was ahead of her time, opening The Stay-Well, a natural health food store in the 1920s. Her store carried all sorts of produce, flours, bulk seeds, and nuts. She never carried white flour in the store. She never let anything go to waste using — roots, rinds, seeds, and stems.

Rind provides a unique mouthfeel for a satisfying healthy fruit snack. We found Rind addictively delicious.

Find a store near you or shop online. Enjoy guilt-free whole-fruit snacking.

Freeze Dried Natierra

Natierra uses freeze-drying, also known as lyophilization to preserve fruit, removing the water which adds crunch. The process uses no heat to keep the nutrition intact while retaining the fruit’s shape and flavor. After rapidly freezing the fruit they use additional drying phases where moisture is gently removed.

The package may feel light but it contains a lot of fruit. A 1.2-ounce package contains 8 ounces of fresh blueberries (each bag has 140 calories) and 9.7 ounces of fresh strawberries are used to make each .8-ounce package (each bag contains 90 calories).

All Natierra freeze-dried fruit is kosher certified, as well as the Dark Chocolate Chia Seeds, Cacao Nibs, Cacao Powder, and Dark Chocolate Hemp Seeds.

Our team loved this delightful, airy freeze-dried fruit, with no added sugar. We could have eaten it all day. Natierra provides a novel and wonderful mouthfeel. Each bite-sized piece has almost no weight and begins dissolving once you put it in your mouth, releasing a concentrated fruit essence.

Natierra freeze-dried fruit is incredibly light, with an addictive crunch. It provides all the nutritional and fiber of fresh fruit, transformed into a lightweight pop-in-your-mouth snack.

Natierra is available online and in stores.

Traditional Dried Fruit

Dried fruit is a familiar (a la raisin) way of preserving fruit by removing water. During the drying process, the fruit shrinks to about a quarter of its original size, concentrating the flavor and sweetness while retaining vitamins and minerals.

We found Eden Foods’ dried wild, lowbush blueberries, cranberries, and Montmorency Tart Cherries delightful. They are naturally sweet/tart, organic, and sulfite-free.

Eden’s Process – delivers full flavor and moist plumpness

• Cranberries are wet harvested – which is when the grower floods the bog. Then they use a ‘water reel’ to loosen the cranberries from the vines. Harvesters wade into the bog to collect the cranberries floating to the surface. The cranberries are cleaned, sorted, and quick-frozen. Later they are thawed and immersed in apple juice until they reach the right sweetness or ‘Brix’. Finally, they are rinsed, low-heat dried with warm air, and coated with a mist of organic sunflower oil to prevent clumping.
• Blueberries are picked fresh in August, washed and cleaned to remove any leaves and twigs, sorted, and quick-frozen (then they are processed following a similar process as cranberries). It takes 4 pounds of fresh blueberries to produce 1 pound of dried.
• Cherries are picked fresh and cooled overnight in running water, then pitted and quick-frozen. Later, the cherries are thawed and infused with apple juice and low heat to dry and are misted with safflower oil to prevent clumping.

We liked how Edne’s process uses apple juice to rehydrate and sweeten their fruits.

Eden Foods is a natural foods company that began in southern Michigan in 1968 as a cooperative where members searched for farmers to grow food using organic methods. Later, Eden morphed into a natural food store with an extensive line of kosher foods, over 300 products currently certified by the OK, all available online.

Enjoy the Natural Flavors of Fruits

Fruits are amazing foods, packed with vitamins, fiber, and flavor. These brands provide shelf-stable options letting you snack on fruit all year. We were delighted by the range of mouthfeels from light- airy freeze-dried by Natierra, to crunchy-peel by Rind, and traditional dried from Eden. And all would make great additions to your Shalach Manot

These brands deliver uncompromised taste, nutrition, and fiber of fresh fruit that is undeniably tasty, and a fun way to get your 5 fruits a day.