Oxygen Absorber Packets

View your cart's contents.

Bag of oxygen absorbers. Insert: close up of tablet. When it turns blue in an unopened bag the oxygen absorbers have been compromised.

Oxygen Absorber Packets

The oxygen absorbers Walton Feed sells consist of an air proof package holding 100ea 300cc or 500cc oxygen absorber packets. Once it is opened, the unused packets must immediately be put in another air tight package. A small mason jar with a new canning lid should do the trick.
Oxygen absorber packets will not absorb moisture.
If you are planning on using oxygen absorber packets in preserving your edible dry goods, you must be able to seal the container. The oxygen absorber packets absorb the oxygen, leaving a partial vacuum. If your container isn't air tight, the oxygen in the air being sucked into the container will eventually load the packets with oxygen, and introduce oxygen back into your product.
Air is about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. That's about 646 cc of oxygen in an empty #10 can. Seeds take up between 50% and 75% of the volume in a can, leaving perhaps 161-323 cc of oxygen in a filled #10 can.
The oxygen absorber packets Walton Feed uses and sells will actually absorb as much as twice or more of their rated capacity. They are not quite twice as big as the oxygen absorber packets used in the study on this page.
Walton's puts one oxygen absorber packet in their #10 cans and two oxygen absorber packets in their 6 gallon Super Pails.
The oxygen absorber packets used by LDS canneries and in the following study will absorb 300 cc of oxygen.

See our U-Pack section for further information.

The rest of this page is an excerpt from:

Use of Oxygen Absorbers in Dry Pack Canning
Research paper by:
Albert E. Purcell
Theodore C. Barber
John Hal Johnson

At the Benson Quality Assurance Laboratory
Department of Food Science and Nutrition
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

Complete report in a zipped text file (5K)

Conclusions:

Oxygen absorbing packets are effective in reducing oxygen contents in sealed cans. The ageless Z300 packet has a greater than claimed capacity for absorbing oxygen. Packets abused by 4 hour-exposure-to-air still exceed claimed capacity. It may be economical to use smaller packets based on the dead air volume instead of can volume. Smaller packets would have less tolerance for abuse and personnel would need to be more diligent in protecting the packets.

The level of oxygen remaining in the presence of the absorber packets is sufficiently low to greatly retard development of rancidity. The biological consequences are not so easy to predict. Microorganisms range from aerobic to anaerobic, thus no unqualified statement can be made. The energy requirements of anaerobic bacteria are met by reactions between oxygen and more than one other molecule. This makes bacterial energy a higher order of reaction than rancidity. Thus, the rate of bacterial aerobic reaction would be more seriously retarded than rancidity. These matters are not of practical importance because the products to be canned should be too dry to support microbial growth. Insects are aerobic and would like-wise suffer retardation of activity. No comprehensive statement can be made about irreversible inactivation or death of insects. As long as the oxygen level remains low, insect activity will be lower by at least the square root of oxygen content. In a practical sense, these packets are effective in stopping insect activity. USDA does not recognize any method except disintegration as effective for completely killing insect eggs.

Table 1:  Key to Table 2

           Name          Description
     -----------------------------------------
          Blank       Air sealed in a #10 can (No product)
          Fresh       Air + Fresh packet (Exposed less than 5 min)
              X       Air + Exposed packet (Exposed 4 hours)
              O       Product sealed in can with no packet
         Milk O       Dried Milk only
     Milk Fresh       Dried Milk + Fresh packet
         Milk X       Dried Milk + Exposed Packet
          Mac O       Macaroni Only
      Mac Fresh       Macaroni + Fresh packet
          Mac X       Macaroni + Exposed Packet

(Exact measurements couldn't be duplicated in subsequent tests) Table 2: OXYGEN AND NITROGEN CONTENT OF
SAMPLES AT THREE DIFFERENT TIMES

     ------------------------------------------------------
                  % of O2            |          % of N2
                 ---------           |         ---------
                 48       1      2   |  48       1      2
     Sample     hours   week   weeks | hours   week   weeks
                                     |
     Fresh       0.70    0.42   0.43 | 98.36   98.65  98.65
     X           2.27    0.40   0.90 | 98.74   98.67  98.55
     Mac O      20.05   20.18  19.98 | 79.11   78.81  79.19
     Mac X       0.42    0.42   0.42 | 98.64   98.20  98.66
     Mac Fresh   0.45    0.41   0.41 | 98.63   98.66  98.65
     Milk O     20.33   19.99  20.14 | 78.72   79.02  78.99
     Milk X      0.50    0.43   0.27 | 98.57   98.63  98.62
     Milk Fresh  0.48    0.44   0.43 | 98.59   98.63  99.27

Jump to top of page
|| Back to Grinders/Mixers ||Walton's Home Page ||

Doug Eborn, E-mail: info@waltonfeed.com

Home Page URL: http://waltonfeed.com/