Prevent Product Quality Losses by Preventing Freezer Burn

To maintain your online business operating effectively and easily you recurrently freeze your merchandise or elements. Whether or not it’s pie crusts to arrange for the foremost Thanksgiving rush, meat to get a bulk low cost, or a bathtub of ice cream for the desserts you serve.

Freezing retains them good for longer. However, for those who don’t freeze your meals properly, it would develop these dried out areas on the surfaces. The dreaded freezer burn. It could possibly make a frozen product utterly ineffective, and unsellable.

Fortunately, you’ll be able to forestall freezer burn from taking place, utilizing a couple of fundamental pointers, permitting you to securely freeze your meals, with out risking dropping out on product high quality.

Freezer burn = dried frozen meals

Usually talking, by freezing you’ll be able to prolong the shelf lifetime of a variety of meals, with out dramatically impacting their high quality. Meat, many (unfrosted) desserts, ice cream, cookies, doughs, even cheeses, can all be frozen properly. That’s, for those who retailer them correctly.

Nevertheless, for those who don’t retailer them correctly you could discover that after some weeks, or months, seemingly dry spots kind on the meals. It may be a whitish-looking spot on a steak, or a dried-out chunk of ice cream.

That is freezer burn. It’s a counterintuitive title as a result of the meals hasn’t truly burnt within the conventional sense, due to warmth. As an alternative, the meals merely dried out, which can sound counterintuitive as properly. How can meals dry out within the freezer? Hasn’t all water solidified into ice?

An irreversible course of

However no. Even in a freezer, moisture can and can evaporate. It could possibly even flip right into a gasoline from strong ice immediately, with out melting first. That is known as sublimation. Sublimation is a really gradual course of within the freezer, which is why most freezer burn takes weeks, or months to develop. As soon as it’s occurred, it is rather laborious to deliver again the unique texture. However, there’s rather a lot you are able to do to forestall it from taking place!

Stopping Freezer Burn

1. Use a vacuum pack

Probably the greatest methods to forestall freezer burn from taking place is to hoover wrap the meals earlier than storing it within the freezer. By vacuum packing meals you pull out all of the air and, in consequence, the packaging itself sits tightly towards the product. This makes it just about unattainable for water to show right into a gasoline and depart the product. For water to depart the product it wants to have the ability to transfer into (dry) air. If there’s no surrounding air, it might probably’t evaporate.

Verify your packaging specs

To make sure that the vacuum pack really protects you product you should be certain it’s suited to freezing and vacuum packaging your product. A very powerful parameter to take a look at is how simple it’s for moisture to maneuver by way of the packaging.

Regardless that many plastics look as in the event that they’re impenetrable to water, most aren’t. Water gases can nonetheless transfer by way of the fabric, be it at a really gradual charge. Nevertheless, in a freezer you don’t need this gradual motion both.

Search for the water vapor permeability of your packaging materials and speak to your packaging provider about your particular utility.

Generally, vacuum packaging can do extra hurt than good

Vacuum packing works nice for meat, cheese, and seafood. However, it doesn’t work for each meals. Think about making an attempt to hoover pack marshmallows. Throughout packaging, you’re pulling out all of the air, to tug a vacuum. Nevertheless, in consequence, you’ll additionally pull air out of the marshmallows, inflicting them to break down. In case your product collapses on account of vacuum packaging, don’t use it.

The identical applies to merchandise that tend to stay collectively. By pulling a vacuum they’ll be pushed towards one another since all of the air in between is pulled out. This causes them to stay much more. It’s why it’s higher to not use vacuum packaging on merchandise corresponding to grated cheese.

2. Fill it up

To ensure that a product to develop freezer burn, the water within the product ought to be capable of enter the encompassing air. One other approach to restrict the quantity of air and thus house for water to enter is by merely filling up your packaging as a lot as doable. It’s why some ice cream model fill their ice cream tubs proper as much as the highest. That method, freezer burn doesn’t stand an opportunity.

3. Reduce air movement

Water evaporates extra shortly if the evaporated water can shortly transfer away from the product itself. The identical occurs in a freezer. If there’s a robust movement of air, the air movement will transfer away any water vapor that kinds. Consequently, the air surrounding merchandise stays fairly dry. This once more makes it simpler for brand spanking new water to sublimate from ice into gasoline. Inflicting your product to dry out!

As such, watch out with robust air flows in freezers the place unwrapped merchandise are saved. Sure, you could want the air movement to freeze the merchandise shortly. However, as soon as frozen, you run the danger of freezer burn. So, both wrap merchandise, or retailer them in freezers that don’t transfer the air as a lot, so your product stays good for an extended time frame.

4. Restrict freezing occasions

Lastly, if not one of the different measures work in your particular utility, you’ll have to take a look at merely decreasing the general storage time in your freezer. Some merchandise merely can’t be saved for months and even years within the freezer. You could be restricted to a shorter period of time.

Methods to forestall freezer burn

Freezing merchandise is an effective way to scale back prices and put together for prime quantity intervals in your online business. Nevertheless, improperly storing merchandise in your freezer can lead to irreversible freezer burn, a serious high quality defect.

However, by correctly packaging your product, and by decreasing the general time within the freezer, you’ll be able to forestall freezer burn in lots of instances.

Use these to design your subsequent packaging options and inside processes. Need assistance with this? Let me know what it’s you’re fighting and we’ll focus on if and the way I may help in a discovery name.