Spain fresh produce export calendar

Roughly September to March, out of Valencia and Castellón. Spain is the reference point for the entire global easy-peeler trade: when Spanish clementines are on the shelf, no Southern Hemisphere programme has a market.

Clemenules opens the season, Nadorcott and Or carry it past the new year. Almost all of it reaches Northern Europe by truck within a day or two, which is a standard no importer can match on fruit that crossed an ocean.

Roughly November to May. Spain is Europe’s own orange supply, and the months it covers are the months Egypt, Morocco and South Africa are all pricing against.

For an importer the useful reading here is the shoulders. The weeks in November and again in May, when the Spanish crop is opening or finishing, are the weeks an imported programme has room — and the middle of the Spanish season is when it does not.

Roughly October to June across two varieties: Fino through the winter, Verna into the early summer. Between them Spain covers most of the Northern Hemisphere year.

Where Spain stops is where Argentina starts. The Verna tail and the opening of the Argentine season are what set the price for the whole middle of the year, and a buyer watching one without the other is watching half the market.

Roughly January to June out of Huelva, which supplies most of the European fresh strawberry market in the first half of the year.

This is a truck trade and nothing else — fresh strawberries have days of life, not weeks. It is on this calendar because it explains why nobody ships fresh strawberries by sea, and why the Egyptian and Moroccan crops behave the way they do.

Roughly May to September out of Almería and Murcia, taking over from Morocco as the European summer gets going.

Watermelon is heavy and cheap and does not travel far commercially, so this is overland trade within Europe. What it does to an importer is set the price for anything arriving in those months from anywhere else.

Roughly May to September, on the same window as the watermelon and out of the same regions. Piel de Sapo is the Spanish variety; Galia and Cantaloupe are grown for export.

The Spanish window is the reason the Brazilian and Central American programmes end when they do. Once Spain is producing, there is no European market for a melon that spent three weeks at sea.

Roughly May to September out of Aragón, Catalonia and Murcia. Spain is Europe’s stone fruit supply for the summer, and the Southern Hemisphere fills the opposite half of the year.

Stone fruit is picked at a ripeness chosen for the journey, and here the journey is usually a truck. What ships in containers goes further afield, and it is the programme where the difference between a 2°C and a 5°C setpoint shows up as a claim.

Roughly September to January out of the Ribera del Xúquer in Valencia, which turned Rojo Brillante from a curiosity into a European autumn staple in about fifteen years.

Persimmon lands when Southern Hemisphere stone fruit has finished and Northern Hemisphere citrus has barely started, so it competes for shelf space with almost nothing. That gap is exactly why it grew, and it is worth knowing about before pricing anything else into November.

Roughly October to April out of Málaga and Granada — small volume, high price, and the shortest supply chain into Europe of any avocado on this page.

Spanish Hass is not a substitute for a Latin American programme; it is a premium sitting on top of one. What it does to the calendar is thicken the European winter, which is already the best-supplied part of the avocado year.