Spinach is known as a superfood – one of the popularized ways to refer to foods rich in minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients which we all need for our health. Despite the American public’s love for spinach over the years, from back to Popeye’s help in increasing spinach consumption by one-third in 1930, frozen spinach has remained a hidden gem.
Today, we’ll reintroduce it to you, our dear reader, and help illuminate some of the unknown benefits of frozen spinach. It has come a long way since its inception, so it’s worth a second look, at the very least. Let’s start with the basics.
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1. Excellent health benefits
As previously mentioned, regardless of the style of consumption, spinach holds many substances that help your body in numerous different ways. With precious minerals such as iron, potassium, and vitamin K, it holds many benefits for everyday use.
Dieticians everywhere heartily recommend the introduction of spinach into your meals, as a way of ensuring you receive all the necessary nutrients for your body. Being such a healthy green, it helps everything from digestion to red blood cell formation. Additionally, while raw spinach may not have universal appeal, it’s easy to incorporate it as part of your meals to help yourself be healthy and happy in the future.
It’s a proven fact that feeding your body healthy substances serves to elevate mood, create a more sustainable eating habit for your body and boost immune system response. What you put in, is what you get – so make sure you treat your body with the respect it deserves.
2. IQF freezing can offer further benefits
Thanks to innovations in freezing approaches, it’s now possible to store, consume, deliver and afford IQF vegetables nearly effortlessly. This is an incredible development for fruits and vegetables in particular. Consuming fresh might be preferable, but is that always the case for buying fresh, too?
You know yourself best. If your eating habits can’t finish the fresh spinach within days, it might be better to buy the frozen variant instead. Here’s why: when spinach is freshly collected, it holds all of its nutrients and vitamins inside it. As time passes, however, more and more of them become lost to natural processes.
Meanwhile, repeated freezing and thawing lead to some of these nutrients being inevitably lost. However, with the IQF approach, once the spinach is initially frozen, all of its precious substances get locked in and preserved until it is thawed. Later on, by selecting as many IQF-frozen pieces as you need, you’ll thaw only the portion you want, preserving the nutrients in the other pieces for later use. That makes it ideal for consumption if you don’t have regular access to cheap spinach at a farmer’s market nearby, or prefer to eat a little regularly, rather than a lot at once.
3. Ease of use
Nothing compares to the ease of use frozen vegetables offer nowadays. IQF spinach is no exception. To include this delicious vegetable in any of your meals, simply take the package out of the freezer, take as many pieces as you need, and place the rest back. Create your favorite dishes at any point in time.
Why this works: before, freezing vegetables was a more complicated process, where the individual bits and pieces often stuck together by the end. This created problems in the appearance, as well as the practicality of separating the spinach, which made it less popular, as an option. Nowadays, thanks to the incredible addition of the IQF freezing tunnel, which freezes the cut-up pieces individually, ensuring there’s no clumping together, those issues have become a thing of the past.
Keep yourself and the people you care about healthy, by introducing a healthy addition to your everyday meals, a little bit at a time. It’s also perfect if you need greens for pesto or smoothies – it fits in perfectly and creates a healthier blend.
4. Sustainability
Now, more than ever, sustainability and eco-friendliness have come to the forefront, as deciding factors in making informed, wise purchases. As the saying goes, you vote with your money – so choosing frozen products means choosing our future. It’s no secret that buying and consuming exactly as much as you need, in our modern, consumerist society is no easy task. However, it is by no means impossible or unlikely – and this is one of the best methods of doing so.
Choosing to buy frozen spinach, you only consume as much as you need. There’s no waste, as frozen products often last for far, far longer than their fresh counterparts. Keep them for as long as you need, and take advantage of the nutrients stored within. Meanwhile, it doesn’t mean you can’t buy fresh, in small quantities. It just means that there’s an option so that you don’t risk over-purchasing products, to only have to throw them away afterward.
5. Affordability
One of the key problems in eating healthy, during the modern-day, is that it can be difficult. Indeed, it may seem at times that it is easier to keep consuming unhealthy fast-food products than making a healthy meal for yourself and your loved ones. That’s not entirely untrue, but it is something the IQF technology has been designed to account for.
As a result, the incoming frozen products are more economical, better quality, and provide a better nutritious component than most other freezing approaches. It’s easier than ever to afford frozen fresh produce, and as a result, incorporate small changes into your daily life that will see you healthier and happier by the end. A lot of our lives are informed by how we eat – don’t let your life be informed by junk food and bad habits. Breaking the chain doesn’t have to be hard – take it one frozen spinach at a time.
We sincerely hope we’ve convinced you to at least give frozen spinach a try! Its taste, texture, and overall appeal have significantly improved over the years, while the ease of use in cooking and regular consumption has only ever increased with time. Unlike some fresh products, you can be certain that frozen ones have no additives to aid in preservation – which is another, hidden, health bonus.
If you are interested in discovering more news about vegetable processing technology, we kindly invite you to visit Octofrost website and to find out the latest trends in IQF industry and food processing.