Colombia fresh produce export calendar

Every week of the year, out of Urabá and the Magdalena region through Turbo, Santa Marta and Cartagena. Colombia has shipped bananas on standing programmes for a century and the lane never closes.

The Caribbean ports are the shortest hop from South America to both Rotterdam and the US East Coast, which is Colombia’s structural advantage on a product where the fruit itself is indistinguishable between origins.

Two harvests a year: the main crop from about September to January, and the traviesa from April to July. Between them Colombia is close to a year-round avocado origin on its own, which outside Mexico is rare.

This is the fastest-scaling avocado programme in the world and it lands in exactly the months Peru used to have to itself. If you have bought Peruvian Hass in June for years, this is the window where you now have an alternative — and so does everyone bidding against you.

Year-round with a peak through the middle of the year. Colombia is the third origin on the European lime shelf after Mexico and Brazil, and it is the closest of the three.

Limes travel well and the trade is priced on freight and market timing rather than on quality differences between origins, so the Colombian window is worth watching mostly for what it does to the price when Mexico has a bad month.

Harvested most of the year with a firm peak into the Northern Hemisphere winter, when European demand for it is highest. Colombia is effectively the only origin exporting uchuva at scale.

The husk does a lot of the preservation work, which is what made the move from air to sea possible. It is still high-value, low-volume cargo on a narrow temperature margin — the kind of container where knowing the reefer held its setpoint is worth more than knowing the ETA.

A main window in the Northern Hemisphere spring and a smaller one in the autumn. Gulupa — purple passion fruit — is what European buyers mean when they order passion fruit, and Colombia is its main origin.

The commercial risk is cosmetic rather than microbiological. Gulupa wrinkles as it loses moisture and a wrinkled fruit reads as old to a buyer even when the pulp is perfect, so humidity in the container matters as much as temperature does.

Year-round, on the same programme logic as bananas and frequently on the same vessels out of Urabá.

Colombia’s plantain trade skews towards the United States and towards diaspora retail rather than towards European multiples, which means smaller lots, more mixed loads and more opportunity for a consignment to get split across containers.