IQF means individually quick frozen. Each berry is frozen separately in a blast of air at around -35 to -40 degrees Celsius, so the pieces stay loose instead of fusing into a block. Fast freezing forms small ice crystals, which limits cell damage, so the fruit holds its shape and loses less liquid on thawing.
Why the speed matters
Water in plant tissue turns to ice mainly between -1 and -5 degrees Celsius. The longer the fruit spends in that band, the larger the crystals grow, and large crystals puncture cell walls. Punctured cells release their contents on thawing, which is what buyers see as drip loss and soft, watery fruit.
What it means in practice
For a buyer, IQF delivers two commercial properties: the product pours, so it can be dosed automatically and portioned without thawing the whole carton, and it thaws with lower drip loss, so the fruit still looks like fruit in the finished product.
It does not, on its own, tell you anything about grade, calibre or defect level. Those are separate clauses – see frozen berry grades. Read the full process in IQF freezing explained.