Drying is one of the oldest preservation techniques. Natural drying (drying in the shade) and hot air drying are still most widely used methods to produce dried parsley flakes, because of their lower cost. Natural drying has many disadvantages due to the inability to handle the large quantities and to achieve consistent quality standards (Soysal & O¨ ztekin, 2001). Continuous and batch dryers are generally used depending on the daily processed product tonnage. Some industrial sectors, such as instant food and dried soup producers are interested only in colour, not flavour (Axtell & Bush, 1991). Dried parsley should have a bright green colour; hence it should be dried quickly in order to inactivate the enzyme chlorophyllase which breaks down chlor-ophyll turning the leaf yellow (Fraser & Whish, 1997). Thus, to produce green parsley flakes, drying tempera-tures in excess of 80 1C are generally used (Axtell & Bush, 1991). Nevertheless, temperatures exceeding 60 1C can cause a significant loss of the leaf volatile oil (Deans et al., 1991). In addition to this, other major drawbacks of hot air drying are low-energy efficiency and a lengthy drying time during the last stage of drying. For example, Parker (1999) carried out the drying experiments for sweet basil, pesto basil, marjoram, lemongrass and parsley in a hot air dryer with a capacity of 500 g fresh leaf materials. It is reported that the hot air drying process which reduced the parsley leaves moisture contents from 80