You see, my mom has been lately buying this bags which contain dried fruit like, say, coconuts, melons, oranges and so, chopped in small thin pieces.
This morning she was eating those things when I told her “Whoa! I wonder how they manage to turn juicy fruit into such small chips”.
“I don´t know”, she replied, " why don´t you post the question in that web page you´re visiting for hours when you could be doing something more productive?"
Maybe it was a joke, but here I am and the question is posted.
You can sun dry apricots and make raisins out of grapes by the same method.
However, food processing companies use drying machines of various types, gas, electric, vacuum, etc… You can get a line on them by searching for “food dryers” in any good search engine.
You can buy fruit dryers. My friends i Utah (where having a stock of preserved food is a religious virtue) had such fruit dryers.
As mentioned above, you can also freeze-dry fruits, although these are hard to come by, outside of hikers’ fare. Too bad, because I love freeze-dried apples. A vending machine at on of the schools I attended used to stock them. They’re damned hard to come by, though.
I believe they are added to prvent fungus and mold growth. And I always thought raisins were dried in the sun . . . which makes no sense in this fast paced post-industrial age.