Individually Quick Frozen

'Individually Quick Frozen' (IQF) products are becoming increasingly popular. Whether you need to reduce lumping of diced products during freezing, improve reliability of dosing pizza toppings, minimise fines of easily breakable preparations, ensure homogenous product distribution of ready meal mixes, or optimise surface coating (just to mention a few of the IQF benefits), cryogenic techniques are the optimum answer.

Our IQF solutions, developed in cooperation with PACKO, include continuous tumbler/rotary freezer, multibelt freezer and batch tumblers.  This equipment ensures process efficiency in combination with our injection and exhausting systems.

Meatballs are typical "wet and soft product", that requires very careful handling in IQF. Other similar products are ground meat, marinated meats and chopped fresh poultry products.

Usually the basic meatball mix (meat, flour, water, spices, etc.) is made in batches in mixers, and then the individual meatballs are formed with various processes where the temperature of the product might increase by a few degrees.

Chilling for better storage or for subsequent cooling with sauces or freezing is usually required before distribution. The challenge is to chill/freeze uniformly without breaking the product and without lumping the meatballs together.

Diced products and similar (hard non-sticky products) are relatively easy to IQF, providing that appropriate mechanical agitation is applied in order to keep the parts separate and free-flowing, but without causing product fragmentation.  The choice of equipment is therefore of fundamental importance, because constant and appropriate motion of the products during the freezing process can ensure a complete IQF (free rolling) product with minimal fragmentation.

We provide customised assistance and complete solution packages to help you select the best equipment and process for your specific needs.

Batch tumblers or line rotary equipment can be supplied in a variety of sizes to suit most space and capacity requirements.

This type of equipment is especially well suited for fragile/breakable products and for small sized products, like meatballs, pizza toppings, grated cheese, peas and berries.