Frozen sourcing moves your risk upstream
Sourcing fresh produce and sourcing frozen produce feel like the same job and are not. With fresh fruit, most of what can go wrong happens after it leaves the packhouse: field heat that was never pulled out, a reefer set wrong, a delay at a port. Your leverage is in the cold chain, and a careful buyer spends their attention there.
Frozen fruit is the opposite. By the time a container is loaded, the quality has been fixed for months. It was decided in the hours between picking and the freezing tunnel, and in the discipline of the sorting line before that. Nothing downstream improves it, and no inspection at your end can undo it. That is why sourcing frozen well is mostly a question about a process you will never watch happen — and why the questions you ask before the first order matter more than the ones you ask after it.
What “quick frozen” actually commits a supplier to
Every frozen supplier writes IQF on a spec sheet. Far fewer are agreeing to anything measurable when they do. There is a standard that makes it concrete: Codex CXS 320-2015 defines the quick freezing process as complete only when the product has reached −18 °C at its thermal centre after thermal stabilisation — the middle of the fruit, not the air around it — and requires −18 °C or colder at every point in the cold chain that follows.
That distinction is the whole product. Fruit chilled quickly on the outside and slowly in the middle grows large ice crystals in its own tissue, and those crystals cut the cell walls. You do not see it in a frozen sample. You see it as a puddle when the fruit thaws. Naming the standard in your contract converts an adjective into an obligation, and it costs you nothing to do.
Write the specification before you ask for a price
The most expensive mistake in frozen sourcing is asking for a price first. Once a number is on the table the conversation becomes about the number, and every detail left unwritten gets resolved later in the supplier's favour — not dishonestly, just by default. A frozen fruit specification should pin down all of the following:
- Product and variety. “Strawberries” is not a specification; Festival, Fortuna and Sensation behave differently after freezing.
- Form. Whole, halved, sliced, diced — and the cube dimensions if diced.
- Calibre band. A named range, not the word medium.
- Grade. Grade A, Grade B or industrial, and what tolerance for defects each carries.
- Glaze. Whether there is any, and if so at what percentage. This is where undeclared water is sold as fruit.
- Pack format and carton dimensions. Cartons that do not fit a container efficiently cost you freight on every shipment.
- Storage temperature and shelf life from date of production.
- The residue standard. For European entry, the limits in the EU pesticide MRL database.
- The certification set you require, and whether copies travel with the shipment.
Where a product standard exists, cite it. Codex CXS 52-1981 for quick frozen strawberries is a good example: it fixes the recognised styles and, more usefully in a dispute, the tolerances for disintegrated and blemished fruit. Two parties arguing from the same document argue much more briefly.
The question most buyers forget to ask
Ask whether the supplier freezes the fruit themselves.
A great deal of frozen fruit is sold by traders who buy it already frozen. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but it has one consequence you should price in: a trader cannot tell you how many hours passed between picking and the tunnel, because they were not there when it happened. They can tell you what they were told. On a product whose entire quality was decided in those hours, that is a meaningful gap.
A processor with their own lines can answer in a sentence, and the answer is the most predictive number in frozen fruit. Same-day is excellent. Next-morning is common and acceptable. If nobody will give you a number at all, you have learned something.
Five questions that separate a processor from a trader
- How many tonnes a day can you freeze? Capacity tells you whether your programme is a priority or a favour.
- How much cold store do you hold? This is what makes a seasonal crop a year-round line. No store means no supply out of season, whatever the website says.
- How long from harvest to the tunnel? The number above. Ask for hours, not adjectives.
- When do you test — before harvest or after freezing? Testing a frozen lot tells you what you already own. Testing in the field tells you what to pick.
- What happens to fruit that fails? The right answer is that it leaves the line. The wrong answer is that it is downgraded into the same carton at a lower grade.
Certification underwrites some of this but not all of it. GLOBALG.A.P. audits the farm, a food safety scheme audits the factory, and neither of them audits how fast a lorry got from the field to the door. That part you have to ask about.
Sampling, and what a sample cannot tell you
Take samples, always, and be specific about them: name the form, the calibre and the grade you expect the sample to represent, and ask which production lot it came from. Thaw part of it and look at what is left in the tray — drip loss is where poor freezing shows up.
But keep the limits in mind. A sample tells you about a lot. It does not tell you about a season, and it certainly does not tell you what will arrive in month seven of a programme when the fruit is coming out of store rather than off the line. That is what a pre-shipment inspection you control is for, and on a first order it is worth paying for.
Exporting side: what your supplier needs from you
Sourcing is a two-way document. Buyers routinely send an enquiry that cannot be quoted — “price for frozen strawberries” — and then wonder why the reply is slow or vague. An exporter needs five things to give you a real number: the product and form, the volume, the destination port, the Incoterm, and your target timing. Add label requirements if you want private label.
The Incoterm matters more than most buyers expect, because it decides where your risk begins and what the quoted price actually contains. FOB and CIF are not two prices for the same thing. If you are new to the route, agree the Incoterm before you compare quotes, or you will be comparing numbers that do not describe the same obligation.
The documents, briefly
A frozen consignment travels with a health certificate, a certificate of origin, the packing list, the commercial invoice and the certification copies; consignments into the EU are pre-notified. The detail of who issues what, when, and what an EUR.1 is for belongs in a longer piece — we wrote it: importing fruit and vegetables from Egypt, step by step.
The one thing worth saying here is about timing. Papers issued as production closes reach you before the container does. Papers issued after loading arrive when the container is already sitting at your port, and demurrage is charged by the day.