Review methodology

The honest starting point

Sublime Pantry has not bench-tested freeze dryers. Our machine and packaging comparisons are built from published documentation and cited sources; they are not reports of measurements we took. Every comparison on this site carries a methodology box stating whether it is a specification comparison (built from manufacturer documentation and expert sources) or a bench-tested review, which would be built from measurements we had taken ourselves. Today, all comparisons are specification comparisons.

How specification comparisons work

Criteria are declared before products are compared — typically price, batch capacity, tray area, power requirements, pump type, warranty, and service considerations. Figures come from manufacturer pages and documentation, cited with access dates. Where manufacturers disagree with third-party listings, we use the manufacturer's own figure and note the discrepancy. Prices are listed with the date checked, because they change.

If we publish original testing

We have not committed to a testing program or a date. If we ever publish original testing, the report will describe what was tested, the method, the conditions and the limits, and it will be clearly separated from these documentation comparisons.

An earlier version of this page went further and specified the protocol such a test would follow — identical loads by weight and food type, logged cycle times, energy metering, water-activity readings, noise measurements, reproducible by any reader with the same equipment. We have no test bench, so that was a description of work nobody has scheduled, written in the future tense of something already underway. It has been removed.

When sources disagree

We show the disagreement where it affects a decision. If the available documentation does not settle it, we do not manufacture a single answer: the page says what each source states and points you to the party who can confirm it for the exact model or product you are buying.

That applies to our own pages too. Where two of our pages publish different figures for the same specification, the disagreement is recorded against the shared machine record and both figures stay as published until the source is read — because quietly adopting whichever figure appears more often is a decision about what is true, made on no evidence.

Conflicts

We hold no affiliate relationships today. We do sell our own packaging, and it sits in a category we compare — the storage container comparison — so that relationship is disclosed inside the comparison itself, not only here — see our affiliate disclosure.