United States fresh produce export calendar

Washington picks from August to November and then ships out of controlled-atmosphere storage for most of the following year, with the export peak from October to March. The shoulder band below covers every remaining month because the fruit genuinely is still moving: this is a selling programme, not a harvest.

The buyers are in Asia and South Asia — Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India — and what decides whether a season was good is rarely the crop. Tariffs, the dollar and access to a single large market move an American apple programme more than the weather does, which is a different kind of planning risk from the ones further up this page.

Roughly June and July out of Washington and Oregon, opening in California in May and finishing in August. It is the Northern Hemisphere’s volume cherry window and the mirror image of Chile’s — the same fruit, largely the same Asian buyers, the opposite half of the year.

It is also the textbook airfreight programme: picked, packed and flown within a day or two, because the price decays faster than the fruit does. The sea volume is real, it goes on the fastest services available, and a rolled sailing in this window is not recoverable.

Roughly August to October out of California’s San Joaquin Valley, opening in Coachella in early summer and shipping from cold storage into December. It covers the months between the end of the Southern Hemisphere programmes and the start of the next.

A European buyer rarely sees this window, because Turkey, Egypt and southern Europe are filling the same weeks much closer to home. An Asian one sees it as the direct alternative to Australia and to the tail of the Peruvian season.

California navels run from about November to May, peaking after the new year, with Valencias behind them into the summer. Korea, Japan and China are the markets.

This is a variety and sizing trade more than a seasonal one. Navels are sold as eating fruit on a brand and to a size specification, so a container that arrives with the wrong count per carton is a commercial problem rather than a quality one — and it is a problem no amount of temperature discipline would have prevented.

Roughly September to November out of Washington and Oregon, opening in August and shipping from storage into the new year.

Pears out of controlled-atmosphere storage are the least urgent cargo an American exporter loads, and that is exactly the risk. An unhurried box is the one that sits at the far end while somebody gets round to it. The fruit will be fine; the free time will not.