Pomegranate season by country

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.

Hicaznar runs from about October to December, and stored fruit ships into the new year. Turkey and Egypt are the two Mediterranean origins a European buyer sees in those months, a few weeks apart.

Pomegranate is one of the most forgiving things in a reefer — it stores for months and it does not bruise easily — which is why the shipping season stretches so far past the harvest, and why nobody watches the container. On this row the risk is demurrage rather than quality.

India ships on two crops. The mrig bahar harvest carries the main export window from about September to December; the ambe bahar crop fills a second, thinner window in the Northern Hemisphere spring.

Between them they cover the months Turkey and Egypt do not, which is what makes India the origin a year-round pomegranate programme needs. The fruit stores for months, so as on every other pomegranate row here, the risk sits at the far end rather than at sea.