Fresh produce

Varieties and what suits your market

Starking Delicious is the volume variety in Gulf trade: deep red, sweet, with a thick skin that travels. Golden Delicious is yellow, more aromatic, thinner-skinned and needs gentler handling. Granny Smith is green, tart, the firmest of them and the longest on the shelf, with steady Saudi demand. Fuji and Gala are sweeter and juicier, and their market is growing. Amasya is an aromatic local variety in limited supply. The choice is not a matter of preference: each variety has its own harvest window and its own storage behaviour, and anyone offering you every variety at one price in every month of the year is not selling you from an orchard.

Season and storage

Harvest opens with Gala in August, then Starking and Golden through September and October, then Granny Smith in October and November. After picking, the crop goes into either ordinary cold rooms or controlled-atmosphere rooms held at low oxygen. The second holds firmness far longer and costs more. The difference is invisible in the carton and perfectly visible on your customer's shelf two weeks later. So we ask the exporter when the goods entered store and what kind of store it was, and we measure firmness on a sample with a penetrometer before loading instead of judging by eye. On this item that is the single most valuable step there is.

Grading and packing

Grading is by fruit diameter in millimetres or by count per carton, and the Gulf market leans to medium and large sizes. The common export carton is 18 kg with a separate lid, holding moulded trays that keep the fruit apart and prevent bruising; sensitive varieties may also be individually wrapped in tissue. Bruising is the real enemy here: it does not show on loading day and turns into a brown patch within days. So we check how the pallet is stacked and how the straps hold, because a container whose load shifts in transit arrives with a higher damage rate no matter how sound the fruit was at packing.

Cold chain and documents

Apples ship in a reefer close to freezing at high humidity with the ventilation set. Ventilation is not a detail: apples give off ethylene, and letting it build up in a closed container accelerates ripening and ages the consignment before it arrives. The documents are a phytosanitary certificate from the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, a certificate of origin, and a pesticide residue analysis matching the limit applied in the destination. For Saudi Arabia the clearance requirements for fresh produce are reviewed before booking, because a reefer stopped on the quay loses shelf life by the hour and will not wait for paperwork to be reviewed.