Individual Quick Freezing technology – Concept and advantages

Frozen foods are loved by adults and kids all over the world. These foods are frozen in order to restore their nutrients and improve their shelf life to a great extent. Freezing is quite an old process and as in the case of many other industries, some new and breakthrough innovations have been carried out in freezing technology as well. The result is the new IQF (Individual Quick Freezing). This method has created a revolution in the way fruits and vegetables are being frozen all over the world. As the name indicates, each and every piece of food is frozen individually here by making a simple process change. You can read more about this technology at abc.com.

The concept of IQF has been introduced in order to improve the nutrients of fruits and vegetables and to retain their freshness even after many days of being harvested from the farm. With this technology, these foods not only retain their colour and shape, but also their taste and nutritional value, which is a big plus indeed. Every piece of food chosen for this technology will be put through a fluidisation process, wherein they will get frozen through a burst of fresh, cold air within 10 to 12 minutes. In the old technology, these would be put in a common blast freezer for around 4 hours or more.

When fruits and vegetables are frozen in large batches, lumps get formed at times. At some other times, not all the items are frozen uniformly. This problem is completely eradicated in the Individual Quick Freezing technology. When cold air is directly applied on the food products, they get frozen quickly. The products move freely, as they are loaded on to an air blast tunnel and frozen within no time at all. As an end customer, when you buy a packet of individually quick frozen food, you can defrost or thaw only the amount that you need at a particular time. The rest can be safely packed and put back in the freezer.

Vitamins, antioxidants and fibres are the nutritional elements that tend to erode quickly when foods are frozen. However the Individual Quick Freezing technology ensures that fruits and vegetables have their elements intact at the end of the process too. These foods are tested by the necessary quality departments are given for sales to retail stores, only if is confirmed that their nutritional values have not reduced. You can be sure of the quality of your quick frozen foods, as they have passed rigorous rounds of testing and quality appraisals.

Tips to consider while making big investments like industrial refrigerators

Starting a business and setting it up can cost a huge sum of money. Irrespective of the level and nature of your business, you must exercise prudence while purchasing industrial machinery, as they can eat up a lot of cost. Refrigeration units like walk-in freezers are no exceptions to this rule. Hence you must invest in them only if it is absolutely necessary. While investing them, you should think of ways and means to check if you can reduce the costs in any way. Here are some tips as explained by www.rinac.com that will help you think on those lines.

Any kind of industrial cooling unit should be directly proportional to the size of your business. Do not invest in machinery that is bigger than what you require. This rule applies to refrigerated trucks as well. To know what size of cooling unit you want, you must be having thorough knowledge about the floor area available in your business space to fit in this unit. Knowing the right size is of utmost importance, because you don’t want your cooling unit to be hindering the paths of your employees or customers.

Once you have decided the size, think about the patterns available in that. Speak to experts and consultants to know if buying a ready-made unit would yield more profits or if buying the spare parts and manually assembling them would be more profitable. Think about the cost factors involved in both these methods, do a cost benefit analysis and choose the perfect solution. Next is the issue of maintaining the cooling unit.

Any freezer unit will last only for a short time if it is prone to frequent operations. The freezer door should not be opened and closed frequently, because it does not help proper cold air circulation in the internal unit. If cold air keeps going out, your unit would become faulty in no time. Hence, in order to save on huge repair costs, consider installing strip curtains in your freezer at the time of setting up the unit itself, so that it allows cold air to stay inside even when the doors are open for a while.

Have a clear idea about the temperature that you want around your freezer and the average temperature of the foods that you will store inside your unit. You should have an average idea of the maximum temperature that you would require, because it becomes very costly and complex to reset the temperatures after the unit has been installed.