A Fruit snack is processed fruit that eats like a traditional snack food. It can be deposited, freeze dried, or air dried and may be called Fruit Leather, Fruit YoYos, Fruit Bars, Freeze Dried Fruit, or most commonly, are simply known as "Fruit Snacks".
Most of the fruit snacks are deposited after blending a variety of ingredients, while many are merely sun or air dried. This is like laying out the pieces of fruit in the sun to have the moisture vaporize from the fruit. Air dried gets almost the similar result, which is accomplished by blowing hot air over the fruit in some sort of an oven; this is most like a Fruit Leather.
More and more fruits are being fried in vacuum fryers. The use of a vacuum in the frying process causes the processed food (fruit) not to take in as much fat as traditional frying. This makes the processed food less unhealthy.
Other ways of processing a fruit is by freeze drying. This helps to retain the good of the fruit while drying. This process also makes use of vacuum. The fruit retains it cell structure which causes it to be crisp. Freeze drying is often used for astronaut food. Most of the nutritional values maintain in the residue of the processed food, but at a lower weight and/or volume.
Fruit snacks generally fall into two camps. The first, the fruit snack most familiar to consumers are commercial products, produced by combining fruit juices and fruit purees with colors and flavors. They may contain other ingredients including starches, gelatin, sugar and corn syrups. Typically they contain between 15-20% moisture to give the product a desirable soft chewy texture. There are also fruit snacks that are processed snack food made from gelatin, and fruit which can consist of grape, lemon, strawberry, orange and cherry. Specific brands of fruit snacks include Welch's, Frispy, Majans BHUJA Mix, CLIF Kid Organic Twisted Fruit, GoGo SqueeZ . Some are known as fruity snacks, or fruit flavored snacks, because they do not contain any meaningful content of real fruit or sometimes any fruit. Fruit by the Foot, Fruit Roll-Ups, CUB Foods are examples. Some fruit snacks may also have a liquid filled center made with real fruit juice and are known as Juicefuls. Some liquid filled centers do not contain fruit or fruit juice such as Gushers. Most are fat free. The second, there are fruit snacks such as certain fruit leathers that contain a meaningful amount of fruit and no gelatin. Joray Fruit Rolls are an example of this, containing dried apricot.
Often, fruit snacks are thought of as a healthy snack, But not all of the fruit snacks are in reality healthy. They are often processed in such a way that most of its original nutritional values have declined. In fact, many packaged fruit snacks contain a label explaining that the contents are merely "fruit flavored" rather than actual dried fruit. There is only one that is almost similar to the original fruit and that is freeze dried fruit. Some however, are produced with Vitamins including A, C and or E and are gluten free and fat free and made with real fruit and or fruit juice ingredients.