What is IQF Food? | Guide to Quick Frozen Fruit & Veg - Projuice

Imagine enjoying a juicy strawberry in the middle of winter or savouring fresh blueberries months after they’ve been harvested. How is this possible? Individual Quick Freezing (IQF)! 

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This innovative technology freezes foods quickly and individually. No more clumpy, freezer-burned blobs; with IQF, each morsel is perfectly preserved, keeping its flavour, texture, and nutritional goodness intact. Join us as we explore how IQF keeps our foods deliciously fresh all year round.

What Does IQF Stand for in Food?

IQF stands for Individual Quick Freezing, which is a freezing technique that involves rapidly freezing each piece of food individually. This differs from traditional freezing methods, where food is frozen in larger batches. 

IQF technology is typically used for smaller pieces of food, such as berries, fruits, sliced or diced vegetables, meat, shrimp, and cheese. Items that have been frozen by IQF are usually referred to as individually quick frozen.

What’s the Difference Between Conventional Freezing and IQF?

Conventional freezing slowly freezes fruit and vegetables that are on a tray, pallet or container. Items are usually frozen in big batches, and it is an inexpensive and simple process. However, freezing food in this manner can cause large ice crystals to form in the food which has a negative impact on the flavour, texture and colour of the food. 

IQF freezing rapidly freezes individual pieces of fruit and vegetables. This is best for freezing smaller items like berries, fruit and veg chunks. By rapidly freezing the food, the formation of ice crystals is minimised, helping to preserve the colour, flavour and texture of the items. 

This flash-freezing process locks in the natural flavours and nutrients, preserving the peak ripeness of produce.

What’s the Difference Between IQF and Blast Freezing?

While both IQF and blast freezing are methods used to freeze food quickly to preserve its quality, they have distinct differences. 

IQF involves freezing individual pieces of food quickly. Each piece of food remains separate, making it easy to portion out exactly what you need. It is ideal for small or irregularly shaped items like berries, shrimp, or peas.

Blast Freezing involves food being placed in a blast freezer where extremely cold air circulates around it, rapidly lowering its temperature. It is typically used for bulk quantities, resulting in food items freezing together unless separated before freezing. Blast freezing is commonly used for larger items or packaged foods like whole fish, meat cuts, or prepared meals.

How Does IQF Work?

After harvesting, food items are washed, peeled, cut, or otherwise prepared as needed. The food is then frozen using one of two methods. 

Mechanical Freezing

For mechanical freezing, food is placed in a stream of cold air that causes it to freeze quickly and individually. Food is frozen at extremely low temperatures, between -30°C and -40°C. The process has been refined over the years to limit the impact of freezing on the food so that the nutrition, taste and texture remain as good as possible. 

Cryogenic Freezing 

Liquid nitrogen or carbon dioxide is used to freeze the food rapidly at extremely low temperatures. This method is very fast and effective for maintaining food quality. 

However, it is much more expensive than mechanical freezing, so most IQF frozen fruit suppliers use mechanical freezing due to lower energy consumption and lower operating costs. 

Once frozen, the individual food pieces are packaged for storage and distribution.

IQF Fruits and Veg at Projuice

All of our IQF fruits and vegetables are sustainably sourced and 100% traceable to provide you and your customers with only the very best. Our IQF fruits and vegetables are supplied by Crops. The fruit is cut and frozen within 2-4 hours of harvesting, which helps to preserve the natural flavours, vitamins and textures, ensuring you can consistently create great-tasting food and drink. 

Benefits of IQF

In contrast to fresh fruit, which may spend days to weeks in transit before reaching your plate, IQF frozen fruit undergoes the freezing process within hours of harvest. This flash-freezing technology captures the essential vitamins and minerals at their peak, ensuring that the frozen produce remains nutrient-dense. 

Quality Preservation

One of the most significant benefits of IQF is the preservation of food quality. The rapid freezing process used in IQF minimises the formation of large ice crystals, which are common in traditional freezing methods. Large ice crystals can damage the cell structure of food, leading to a loss of texture and flavour. 

By freezing food quickly, IQF ensures that ice crystals remain small, preserving the integrity of the food. This means that fruits, vegetables, seafood, and other items retain their original taste, texture, and nutritional value, making them more appealing to consumers.

Contact us to discuss your requirements of Iqf Fruits. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.

Convenience

IQF offers unparalleled convenience for both consumers and food service providers. Since the food items are frozen individually, users can easily portion out exactly what they need without having to defrost an entire package. This is particularly beneficial for products like berries, fruits, or diced vegetables, where precise portions are often required. 

The ability to use only what is needed helps reduce preparation time and simplifies meal planning, making it an ideal solution for busy households and commercial kitchens alike. 

At Projuice, we use IQF fruit and veg to create our easy-to-use pre-portioned smoothie blends. They come in 150g single-serving packs that are ready to blend, helping to reduce product waste and improve consistency with servings.

Availability

Since fruit and vegetables are seasonal crops, IQF produce allows you to use ingredients all year round, while tasting the same as when they were harvested! This is particularly useful for tropical fruits and berries, which are harder to source fresh all year round. 

IQF fruits and vegetables allow you to serve a consistent menu, with all the ingredients available no matter the season. This should also help to keep prices consistent throughout the year too, as you won’t have to pay more for fruits when they’re not in season. 

With the passage of time, there are more niche and concentrated economies in the global market for food. One of the latest economies in the worldwide food and production industry is the frozen food industry which is growing at a rapidly increasing rate. The progress in food freezing technology is the forefront of this focused market. Companies that offer high-tech freezing technology are making progress at unprecedented speeds. Advances in how goods are frozen and the pace at which a product can be frozen entirely allow us to reach new technological levels.

Frozen storage techniques have also progressed over the years, but the rapid rate at which products are frozen is one of the areas of most importance when it comes to this concept. In the frozen food industry IQF technology is a major player that has come into play. IQF freezing enables producers, distributors, restaurants and business owners to freeze a substantial part of the goods rapidly for quick long lasting storage.

This freezing technique revolutionized the entire food industry. For the purposes of this article, we will concentrate on the exact advantages of using IQF technology in your company.

IQF : An Overview

IQF Technology is an acronym for individual quick freeze technology. It is a method of freezing that involves rapidly freezing products that are placed within the freezer while applying pressure or movement in order to ensure that even large quantities of food do not stick together during the process of freezing.

For illustrative purposes, let us consider the example of IQF Fruit. In the case of fruits that are being frozen, special care has to be take to ensure that individual pieces of fruit do not stick together. This is important because fruits have an extremely delicate exterior. If fruits are in close contact with each other during the process of freezing, their skins can easily crystallize, tear and even discolour and deteriorate.

In order to combat this,  a lot of businesses improvise by vacuum packing or individually wrapping fruits prior to freezing. However, this is a time consuming and expensive process. And moreover, it does not work with every product. For example, IQF Shrimp, IQF Peas, IQF Strawberries and so on. These kinds of products cannot be individually wrapped and as such, it becomes necessary for a better alternative.

This is where IQF Technology comes in. IQF Technology allows for the products to be pressurized or shaken during the process of freezing. Some IQF Technology Freezers do this via machinery, others do so through air pressure. Through this process, each individual product remains separate from its counterparts, ensuring safe and proper freezing and high quality output.

The Importance  of IQF Technology

When it comes to the importance of IQF Technology, there is a plethora of examples and references to cite. However, some of the biggest benefits of IQF Technology would be its efficiency and reliability. Many businesses have been revolutionized with the introduction of an IQF Freezer overnight. From reduction of plastic waste to higher quality food preservation to allowing for large quantities of produce to be frozen at a time, leading to a much higher rate of productivity in production and distribution, the introduction of an IQF Freezer has been a blessing to a myriad of companies and business establishments.

The popularity of the IQF Freezer surpasses its reputation, with businesses in almost every industry employing their use, from producers, to farmers, to distributors, to wholesale companies, restaurants, cafeterias and even hospitals. If one thing is clear, it is that IQF is one of the most sought after means of freezing in the food production market and Individual Quick Freeze Technology is here to stay.

If you are interested in learning more about IQF Freezer or Blast Freezer , please feel free to read on!

Our Range of Freezers

We also have a range of freezers with IQF Technology that come bundled with numerous features. Below are some of the features our IQF Technology.

-No ice buildup in the vents for easy cleaning. Guaranteed
-Capable of continuous 24 hour freezing!
-Freezer models customization to fit any space.
-Low cost, fast and effective freezing

These characteristics of IQF Technology make our freezers unique from other IQF Freezers based on IQF Technology. When it comes to Flash Freezing, trust us to know the best possible solutions for all your freezing needs.

Summing Up

Finally, as a business owner, it is eventually up to you to choose what is best for your company and its needs. Whether you are looking for an IQF Fruit machine or for any other product, we can help you make a calculated choice. A high end freezer should be regarded as long-term investment for the manufacturing of your IQF Fruit. We take pride in the trust our clientele place in our ability to recommend the best freezers for their individual needs. We only deliver quality flash freezers which are intended to satisfy the increased requirements of an ever expanding business in the area of freezing and food manufacturing. Whether with IQF Fruit or with a variety of other fruit and produce, we’ve got you covered whether you’re just expanding domestic or globally.

Are you interested in learning more about Frozen Fruits And Vegetables? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!