There is a marked shift in culture and choice of priorities on account of globalization, economic advancement. This has influenced the characteristics of work generally; to cite specific instance womenfolk actually spent 50-60% of their, time in kitchen; but the trend is to minimize their time in kitchen as their time is more valuable in terms of money and the pressure on them for other activities like leisure and children upbringing. A typical middle class and upper middle class house wives allocation of timings is given in the table below:

Time time spent in %

Cooking child care house- keeping leisure

20 ^th century 50-60 30 5-10 5-10 21 ^st century 20 40 5 35

Again from the work culture not only new areas of work like adventure sports and sports have emerged, also concept of work from 10AM to 6PM _. is no more valid and 24x7 concept has crept everywhere.

All the above lead to one point regular two meals or three times eating in a day has gone away and people want to eat at times of their choice and prefer to go for more and more varieties and they have no time for cooking i.e. people want to outsource their food preparation. The proximity of the restaurants, their timings, _s overcrowding in restaurants, heavy traffic, parking challenges near restaurants and sanitary conditions below their expected levels force the customers to think of alternate solutions. The customers prefer to go for packed nutritious food at any time of their choice .The present day super markets and malls provide excellent facilities matching with any advanced countries for increased shelf life of processed food. Under the present scenario processed food industry is set to have good potential. The industry not only caters to working/House wives, students, but also caters air/rail travelling public and mountaineering and army personnel. This invention is to address the above challenges and bring out a product with flexibility to answer the needs.

Prior Arts: There are many processed food products available in the market and the products are covered in the following patents. The basis of all the technologies are same i.e preservation of food is marred by bacterial growth which is a natural phenomenon with food with water content. The solution lies in dehydration and standards have been laid for the food preservation industry and measures are taken by health and govt, departments to have a check to protect the public consumers. There are commercial products produced by different manufacturers and all these products are covered by technology under the following patents. A few patents are quoted for reference.

1 US 20100159094A1 2. US 20060110508A1

3. US5089281 A

1 .Dehydration by thermal drying process 2. Dehydration by Freeze drying process

Both these technologies take nearly 30 hours for processing and have the challenges below: Besides the long processing time compared to the new process covered by my invention, there are certain challenges, as detailed below, associated with these technologies that prohibits the final finished product to be almost near original product which is the ultimate aim of the subject,

Dehydration by Thermal drying process: Dehydration by thermal process makes the product leathery and removal of bound moisture is not totally ensured and extended drying at high temperature leads to oil separation from the products as well. These implications have an adverse effect on shelf life of products. Dehydration by Freeze drying process: Dehydration by vacuum process removes the flavor of the product there by rendering the product deficient on flavor when compared to the natural product.

The products produced using the above two techniques do not satisfy the quality requirements of natural products in terms of Taste / texture/ Flavours ....etc. further the rehydration time does not go well with the expectation of fast present life.

The current invention is a process for preparation of packaged food items by combining the thermal and vacuum process with the following objectives: 1. Reducing the processing time from 30 hours to 22 hours effecting a good saving of 8 hours (Freezing & Dehydration)

2. Reducing efficiency in power consumption both yielding to cost effectiveness (Freezing & Dehydration)

3. Avoiding leathery formation of a product 4. To retain flavours and texure of the product

5. To give a better shelf life

6. Ensuring the free water content in the product is under control (aw <0.5)

7. Provision to add nutrients to give extra richness in diet value

8. Provision to add additives to meet the customized demand. 9. Rehydration time is reduced to 8 minutes for the entire product

Further the technology covers varieties of products based on rice, sweets and chutneys Freeze drying cum Thermal Drying ( New Process)

1. Biriyani

2. Bisi bela bhath

3. Poha

4. Pongal

5. Tamarind Rice

6. Cheese rice

7. Tomateese

8. Upuma

9. Curd Rice

10. Carrot Halwa(Sweet)

11. Moong dal Halwa( Sweet)

12. Rava Kesari(Sweet)

13. Rice Kheer(Sweet)

14.lnstant Dhal

15.Sambar

16. Coconut Chutney

17. Peanut Chutney

18. Tomato Chutney

19. Tomato Kurma

20. Red Gravy

21. White Gravy

22. Vatha kolambu

Details of Invention:

Whereas the initial process Of selection of raw materials, QA inspection for quality, storage, pre process cleaning/sorting/sifting, washing and soaking, seasoning and cooking remajn the same dp to this point the process covered by this invention differs from the other process hereafter. The flow chart depicts the change clearly. Two flow charts One (Sheet 1-3) represent normal present process and other (4-6) represents process covered under this patent application are attached for clarity .Added operations are shown distinctly in boxes. After mixing nutrients or customized requirements are sprayed over the product in process. The product is transferred to freezing chamber i cold room for 12 hours at a set temperature of -26 ⁰ C; then the product is loaded into freeze dryer to dehydration by vacuum process for 4 hours .The product is then transferred to thermal dehydration and processed at 75 ° C for 1 hr and then 3-4 hours at 50 ° C. Thereafter normal procedure is adopted like any other food processing industry.