Egypt fresh produce export calendar

Roughly December to May, and it is the biggest thing Egypt ships. Egyptian Valencias land while Spanish fruit is still on the tree and undercut it on price, which is most of the commercial argument.

The advantage is geography rather than agriculture. Alexandria and Damietta are days from Southern Europe and about a week from the North Sea ports, so the fruit arrives fresher than anything from the Southern Hemisphere and cheaper than anything grown in the EU.

Roughly May to July, landing in the gap between the end of the Southern Hemisphere programmes and the start of the European harvest. Egypt is the first Northern Hemisphere origin of the year for table grapes.

Being first is the whole position. Egyptian grapes are priced against an empty shelf, and a programme that lands three weeks late lands against Italian and Spanish fruit instead — which is a different market at a different price.

Roughly January to June, landing while European stores from last season are emptying and before the new European crop is lifted.

Potatoes are the least fragile thing on this whole calendar — months of storage life, a wide temperature tolerance — so the risk here is entirely commercial. A late shipment arrives into a market somebody else’s new crop has already supplied.

Roughly February to July, into the gap between European harvests. Like the potatoes, this is a storage crop sold on timing.

Onions cure before they ship and then keep for months, which makes them one of the very few programmes where a delay is a price problem and not a quality one. That is also why nobody watches these containers, and why they are disproportionately the ones sitting at a terminal accruing charges.

Roughly August to December. The harvest itself is short — about September to November — but pomegranates store for months afterwards, so the shipping season outlasts the picking by a wide margin.

That storability makes this one of the least stressful reefer programmes on the page. The exposure is at the other end: a container nobody is in a hurry to collect is a container accruing demurrage on cargo that would have been fine either way.

Roughly June to October, serving the Mediterranean and Gulf markets in the months when the American origins have finished.

Egyptian mango is a short-haul trade — the varieties are grown for regional taste rather than for European retail — so it rarely competes directly with Peruvian or Brazilian fruit. It is on this calendar because it fills a month nothing else does.

Roughly November to April out of the Nile delta, on the same counter-season logic as the Spanish and Moroccan crops.

Most Egyptian strawberry volume is frozen rather than fresh, and it travels as a processing commodity in ordinary reefers rather than as a fragile fresh programme. The fresh trade exists but is small and moves by air.