A Princeton inventor wants to bring freeze-drying to the masses

Alan Anger wants you to know that there's a lot more to freeze-drying than pet preservation. Although that aspect of the trade has landed him recent coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Life, and even on ABC's 20/20, it's only a small niche within his much larger business.

In fact, according to Anger, we'd all be surprised at the many ways that freeze-drying touches our lives. It's not an idle claim– if anyone could count the ways, it would be him. His Princeton-based company, Freezedry Specialties, manufactures freeze-drying machines for use in a variety of applications, including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, museum exhibits, disaster restoration, food preservation, and yes, taxidermy and pet preservation.

After spending nearly three decades as a freeze-drying specialist engaged in esoteric work for pharmaceutical and biotech firms, Anger realized the technique could have a much braoder appeal. (It's a pretty simple process," he says of freeze-drying. "It's just physics.") Just the same, he also understood that to make his mass-market dreams a reality, he needed an easy-to-use version of the high-tech equipment he'd spent his career around.

He began his quest in the late 1980s. By 1992, he'd rolled out his first machine—a bench-top model that was the genesis of the company—and he's been wringing every last drop frm the market ever since. "Up to that point, freeze-drying had been a pretty expensive, use-only-when-needed type process," he says. The chilly form of preservation first freezes and then extracts moisture, producing an object that remains in a state quite close to its natural one. As a result, florists preserving bridal bouquets, taxidermists mounting prize muskies for posterity, and doctors looking to safeguard specimens can all find uses for it. The world evidently is getting hip to the process; Anger says that his company's sales have grown steadily since its inception.

While the media attention on freezing Fido has certainly helped pump up his numbers, Anger remains focused on creating a broader awareness of the technology and bringing freeze-drying technology to the people. "After all," he says, "it doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to work well."