Inside A Durian Factory Making Freeze Dried Durian

They left me in the office with a pile of crinkly bags of durian samples, staring at my polka dotted socks (in Thailand you take your shoes off at the door) and wondering if this little durian bloggess was going to get to see any part of a Really Big Durian Factory.

I’d had some inkling as soon as I called that I was treading on a whole other world of durian, a world of  container trucks, hushed industrial hallways, bleach, rules, business suits, and hundreds of tons of Durian.  Places like these are how durians and durian products arrive in ports around the world, but it’s a hidden, somewhat mystical process that I was eager to see. To watch it on video, scroll down ↓↓

I was stoked that one of their primary products is my favorite: freeze dried durian. While I sat and waited, I tried not to gobble the whole package of crispy, creamy sweet and crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth durian chunks. It wasn’t even quite time for breakfast, but I sifted through the packets on the table looking for some durian seconds.

Check out this blog post comparing 5 kinds of freeze dried durian. Yes, I like this stuff. 

I was considering whether to rip into my second favorite, the jackfruit, when durian factory owner  Mr. Wisut Noppun arrived in his hushed black socks and settled behind the large desk.

I hadn’t been sure I would get to meet him, as when you are responsible for this many durians, you’re probably a very busy person.

Also, I’m not a Chinese business guy. I’m not a big wig importer.

That morning, I was a blogger wearing polka dot socks and I could tell that me and Mr. Noppun were both wondering how I’d got there.

Chanthaburi Global Fruits processes about 1,000 to 1,500 tons of durian every year from the Chanthaburi region, and also trucks some in from Chumphon, in Southern Thailand, during their alternate season, to clean, process, and turn into frozen and freeze-dried durian.

They sell frozen, freeze-dried, and powdered durian on their website and sometimes Amazon (out of stock as of writing). If you’re a raw foodist, you might be interested to know that CGF is also Mr. the brand Matt Monarch sells.

They buy only Monthong, the vanilla-egg standard of Thailand’s commercial durian industry.

Monthongs are big and fleshy, easy to peel off their seeds, and, when cut early, fairly uniform in texture. These are all important characteristics when your opening, deseeding, slicing and dicing more than 400 tons of pure durian flesh.

After assuring Mr. Noppun that despite my Westerness, I do, in fact, like durian, and have a durian-focused business, he agreed to take me into the outer portion of the warehouse.

We slipped on our shoes and headed out into the courtyard. A forklift drifted by bearing an entire crate of durians.

There were three big, faceless white-grey industrial buildings. In the first, trucks piled high with durian backed up into a loading bay.  The driver sat and smoked while men with big gloves assaulted the load, tossing the durians to each other in a two or three-man durian brigade, and placing the durians gently in huge metal cribs.

Each crate is hung with a label marking the date, name of the farmer, and other information I couldn’t read because Thai. The factory tests every load for sugar and starch content, in accordance with Thai law, in order to keep the quality high.

Mr. Noppun said they work with a few hundred farmers.

The durians are then organized according to ripeness and painted with the yellow ripening agent, ethephon, before being stacked to ripen. It was all efficient, clean, and quiet.

I couldn’t help gazing at the room in awe. I’ve seen a lot of durians in my time, but this was A. Lot. Of. Durians.

I found myself wishing I had a drone to fly over the top of all those crates.

Once the durians are ripe, they’re fork lifted next door to another warehouse, where things got even more interesting.

Because the factory exports primarily to China, they have a lot of hygiene rules to abide by.  Mr. Noppun hesitated, and then invited me inside.

But first, I had to deposit my hairbands, earrings and necklace at the office.

“It’s not hygienic,” Mr. Noppun explained seriously, taking off his watch.

Through a door of heavy plastic flaps, we watched the durians being placed on a conveyor belt. They rotated and turned, knocking into each other, and then fell with a splash into a steaming vat of hot water.

The water doesn’t get inside the fruit, and is effective for making sure all dirt, leaves, and bits of bugs are left outside with other unhygienic accessories.

The steam felt kind of good after the ice box of the office.

A belt pulls the durians up, out of the water and on wards until they disappear through a hole in the wall.

We walked around to the side and entered through the main building.

A line of white boots waited for us, with the word “Visitor” printed clearly across them. Mine were extremely too big. The toes dragged on the staircase as I followed Mr. Noppun up to the changing room for their more than 400 employees.

Going Inside The Durian Factory

It was all incredibly neat, tidy, and efficient. A room of lockers. A room of clean, white, pressed lab coats on hangers. A row of sinks. A poster demonstrating the 14-step hand washing process, that Mr. Noppun made sure I followed to the T.

We put on the lab coats, a full-head hair net, a mask, and then a hat over the top.

Then a woman rubbed us down with a lint roller to get rid of any hair.

I even took alcohol wipes to my camera, then pressed my hands into the bowl of disinfectant they had at the door.

Fully suited up, we descended down a flight of algae green stairs into a pool of bleach. It was the Indiana Jones of germaphobia.

If I’d ever had concerns about food safety and freeze dried durian, they’re gone now. That factory was the cleanest place I’d been in perhaps my entire life.

Inside the maze, under the white glare of fluorescent lighting, a small army of people in white were cutting durian. It was eerily quiet, the soft shuffle of knives on cutting boards, the occasional crack of a shell bursting open.

 

Without even a breeze, the smell here was unmistakably, overpoweringly durian. It smelled delicious, despite the stainless steel and the eerie quiet.

It was also cold. I noticed one of the women was sniffling slightly behind her mask. I wondered if it was the temperature or being around durian smell all day. I like durian smell, but it’s powerful stuff.

The whole, washed durians were mounded on one side of the assembly line, where men with flashing knives quickly opened them and dumped their golden interiors onto plastic lined trays.

There the women sorted them by size and shape, pulling aside the ones that were symmetrical and arranging them into pretty rows.

Some of these would be frozen into vacuum sealed packages like you can generally find at your nearest Asian Grocery Store.

The not-quite-so-perfect ones were plopped onto cutting boards and carefully sliced into even-width shapes like a small biscotti.

This shape is, actually, my favorite when it comes to freeze dried durian. The wedges are big enough you can bite them in half with a satisfying crack, but it has something more natural about it than the brands that use molds or cubes.

Every time now that I eat freeze dried durian, I think of this small army of ladies carefully cutting each slice just so.

The little short bits on the sides were placed into a separate container to be turned into durian paste or freeze dried and powdered into a consistency like flour.

Leaving the cutting room, we twisted and turned along a featureless corridor, passing several large flash-freezers.

As I mentioned in a previous post about a Malaysian Export Factory, these work like cyrogenics, quickly cooling the food to prevent cellular damage.

Then we arrived at the room with the freeze drying machines. Mr. Noppun was proud of these. They come from Japan. An engraved plaque hung over each one, announcing where it came from and the year the machine started work in the factory.

Mr. Noppun founded the factory in 2000, around the time that Chanthaburi was starting to become a durian boom town. He was one of the first to invest in freeze drying technology.

Freeze drying durian takes a lot of durian, as the process removes all but about 5% of the moisture. It takes around 14 or 15 kilograms of pure durian flesh to make just 5 kilograms of freeze dried durian, or 67 kilograms of the whole fruit.

But I’m glad they grow enough durian in Thailand to do it. I buy it sometimes even when there’s fresh durian around. It’s just so crispy, and creamy, and utterly addictive. At least for me, and if you’re a durian lover, maybe for you too.

You can buy a few different brands on Amazon. It’s a great Christmas gift. And if you use this link to buy it, you can help support this blog. Thank you.

Video Inside the Durian Factory

Conclusion

To come clean, one of my goals in visiting the factory was to get my tour groups inside, so they could see this process too. It’s just really interesting to me when a durian is taken from it’s natural environment on the farm to an industrial scale setting to ship around the world.

It’s a trip, literally. Next time you’re at home in your pajamas and pull a sack of durian out of the freezer, just think about the journey that it’s been through before you get to eat it. How many people were involved at every step of the process. Hundreds of people made that durian possible.

But after I better understood the rigorous hygiene protocol and licensing rules, I realized that taking my silly, fun-loving Durian Tour groups inside is unlikely to happen. Not with all that shushing and fussing with the bleach. And so, I’m simply sharing with you this blog post.

Yes, the factories are really clean. And yes, freeze dried durian is super delicious.

After our talk, Mr. Noppun still didn’t believe me that Westerners love durian. Maybe a few weird ones, like me, but certainly not enough to make it worth his time and effort to make CGF brand more widely available to the West.

Let’s change his mind, shall we?