Whole berry percentage is the headline number on most frozen berry contracts and it is routinely measured in a way that makes it unenforceable.
A frozen lot looks whole. Fruit that ruptured during freezing keeps its shape while frozen because the ice is doing the structural work, and it collapses on thawing. Assessing whole berry percentage on frozen material therefore measures the wrong thing.
A workable protocol specifies five things: the sample mass, the thaw temperature, the thaw duration, the drainage time and the mesh aperture used for drainage. Two laboratories running different protocols will report figures that differ by more than the commercial tolerance between adjacent grades, which means a contract without a named protocol gives the buyer no claim.
Interpretation is species-dependent. Raspberry and blackberry are structurally fragile and a high whole berry figure on either is genuinely expensive. Redcurrant, blackcurrant and cranberry are more robust and a high figure is normal rather than premium. Aronia is robust enough that the parameter is nearly uninformative, which is why experienced buyers of that fruit specify handling damage differently.
Whole berry percentage is also the best single indicator of how the fruit was actually frozen. A slow freeze forms large ice crystals that rupture cell walls, and the damage shows up here and in drip loss rather than in the appearance of the frozen carton.