author(s)
Mohsin Iqbal, Summar Abbas Naqvi, Muhammad Waseem, Umar Farooq and Naveed Ahmad

abstract
Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) relates to the family Arecaceae. Most developing countries cannot produce enough food to meet their increasing populations. A considerable percentage of crop items produced in some of these areas deteriorate rapidly in quality after harvest due to poor or non-existent processing and storage facilities. The drying is the most important in dates. So, different techniques had been used for better drying of this delicious fruit. Therefore, the objective was to evaluate the performance of Solar dryer and Hybrid dryer to investigate the drying conditions for date fruit. Two factor complete randomized design (CRD) were applied and comparison of mean was prepared by using Tukey's test at 5% level of significance. In our research total soluble salts (10.38 %) were more in solar dryer as compared to the hybrid dryer (9.51 %). Hybrid dryer (0.808 %) achieved more acidity as compared to the solar dryer (0.717 %). Vitamin C content of process dates differs significantly in these dryers as solar dryer and hybrid dryer had 3.68 % and 8.51 % vitamin C respectively. Reducing sugars (18.58 %) were more in hybrid dryer as compared to solar dryer (18.30%). In the same way, total sugars were more in hybrid dryers (31.48 %) and less in solar dryer (30.98 %). As for as the non-reducing sugars are concerned, these were more (12.88 %) in hybrid dryers as compared to the solar dryer (12.69 %). It is concluded that good quality dates cab prepared by adopting hybrid dryers as compared to sun drying techniques.