Apple export season by country

Roughly February to July, shipping from storage well past the harvest itself. Apples are what keeps Chilean volume moving after the summer fruit has finished and the ports have calmed down.

A stored apple programme is the most flexible thing on this page: the seller decides when the container sails. That flexibility is also why apple containers are the ones nobody watches — and demurrage does not care that the cargo was not in a hurry.

Roughly March to July out of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, shipping through Santos — a conventional Southern Hemisphere pome fruit window, and agriculturally a different country from the north-eastern mango and melon regions.

Brazilian apple volume is modest next to Chile’s and South Africa’s, and much of it stays in South America. What reaches Europe does so from storage, on the seller’s timing rather than the harvest’s.

Roughly February to July, from the same Patagonian valleys as the pears and usually in the same programme.

Argentine apples ship from storage on the seller’s timing, so what looks like a five-month window is really a five-month decision. Ask when the exporter intends to ship rather than when the fruit was picked.

Roughly February to July out of the Western Cape, shipping from storage well past the harvest.

South African apples reach Europe in about half the transit a Chilean container needs, which changes the arithmetic on a stored crop: the same fruit arrives with more life in hand for less freight, and that is most of why the UK trade leans this way.

Harvest from February to May out of Hawke’s Bay and Nelson, shipping from March into the Northern Hemisphere autumn. It lands in the months when European and North American apples are at their oldest, which is the entire commercial argument for shipping fruit half way round the world.

New Zealand ships more of its crop under club varieties than any other origin, and those are sold on a promise about condition. That makes what the reefer actually did on a five-week voyage worth more here than on a lane where the fruit is sold as a commodity.

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.

Shandong and Shaanxi harvest from September, the export peak runs from October into the new year, and stored fruit ships through the spring. Fuji is most of what leaves.

The destinations are Southeast and South Asia rather than Europe — Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh — on lanes of one to three weeks. Chinese and American apples are chasing the same buyers in the same months, and it is price rather than season that settles it.

Aomori picks Fuji from October and ships from about November into the spring out of storage, peaking into the new year. Taiwan is by far the largest buyer, with Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam behind it.

For most of that window this is gift fruit rather than retail fruit — sized, graded and boxed for a season that ends on a date. The commercial risk is the calendar rather than the cargo: an apple that misses New Year is a very good apple in an ordinary market.

Harvest from August to October in South Tyrol and Trentino, then out of controlled-atmosphere storage until the following summer. Like every other apple row in this section, the window is a selling programme rather than a harvest.

What distinguishes the Italian one is that it is sold on variety and on grade rather than on price — the club varieties and the Val Venosta and Val di Non brands are the point. That puts it at the opposite end of the same market from Poland, and it is why the two origins can run identical windows without ever competing for the same order.

Harvest from late August to October around Grójec, then out of storage for the rest of the year — the shoulder band below covers every remaining month because the fruit genuinely keeps moving until the next crop lands.

This is the volume-and-price end of the European apple trade, and the market it is sold into has moved twice in a decade: away from Russia after the 2014 embargo, and towards the Middle East, North Africa and South and Southeast Asia since. The second of those is what puts Polish apples in a container at all. Out of Gdańsk to an Asian buyer is five or six weeks on fruit that has already spent months in store, which is a long way to send something sold on being cheap.