Blueberry season by country

Roughly September to February, peaking hard from October to December. This is the programme that built the reefer lane out of Paita, and it is the single busiest thing Peru ships.

Two consequences follow from that concentration. Equipment gets tight in the peak weeks and bookings roll; and the fruit has the least shelf life in hand of anything on this page, so a slow voyage is not a scheduling inconvenience but a quality claim.

Roughly November to February, picking up where Peru’s window tails off. For a European buyer the two origins together mean blueberries land almost every week from September through to the Northern Hemisphere’s own crop.

Chilean blueberries compete for reefer equipment with cherries and grapes in exactly the same weeks. That is the constraint on this programme, more than the harvest is.

Roughly September to November out of Entre Ríos and Tucumán. Argentina opens the Southern Hemisphere blueberry season ahead of both Peru and Chile, which is its whole commercial position.

That early window is also its vulnerability: it is short, it is competing directly with the tail of the Peruvian crop, and the fruit still mostly flies. A sea programme out of Argentina is a bet on a specific arrival week.

Roughly January to June out of the Loukkos and Gharb regions. Moroccan blueberry has scaled very fast and now fills the European spring — the gap between the end of the Peruvian and Chilean programmes and the start of the European harvest.

Freshness is the entire proposition. Fruit picked in Morocco can be on a Rotterdam shelf within days, against three weeks or more for Southern Hemisphere fruit, and on a berry that difference is most of the shelf life.