This page is the index above every product-and-market guide on this site. There are 118 of them, covering 17 crops across 36 destination countries, and until now they existed without anything above them to show how they fit together. Each guide answers one question — what this crop looks like going into that market — and each one links back here.

Two things are worth saying before the tables. First, the coverage below is a map of where guides exist, not a claim about volume, market share or what is available this week; availability is confirmed per shipment, never from a web page. Second, the regional notes describe what changes in kind from one region to the next — discharge ports, documentary requirements, the shape of the buyer — and deliberately carry no transit times or figures, because those move and a number printed here would be wrong by the time you used it. Ask for the current position on your own lane.

The Gulf — GCC

The largest block of coverage on this site, and the region where the Red Sea ports matter: a Gulf-bound container loading at Ain Sokhna stays inside the Red Sea and does not transit Suez, which Mediterranean loadings do. The dominant buyer here is the wholesale trade rather than modern retail, and the two want different things — the wholesale market buys on count, pack and arrival condition, while retail programmes add a documentation layer on top. The documentary requirement that most often surprises a first-time shipper is residue analysis: several Gulf authorities require a certificate of analysis attached to the consignment, and the requirement is set by the importing authority and changes, so it is confirmed per shipment.

The Levant and Iraq

A mix of sea and, on some lanes, overland routing, and the region where the buyer is most often a trading house rather than an end user. Coverage here is thinner and more crop-specific than the Gulf, and it concentrates where Egyptian origin has a natural calendar advantage rather than across the whole range.

North Africa

The region where the pulses line does most of the work rather than the fresh line, because the calendar overlap on fresh produce is unhelpful and dry goods travel without a cold chain. Routing is short, and on several of these lanes the practical constraint is documentary and payment arrangements rather than logistics.

The European Union

The most document-heavy destination on this list and the one where the buyer type decides everything. Loading is from the Mediterranean ports, so these containers transit Suez. Two things separate EU work from Gulf work. The first is the plant-health and residue regime, which is set in EU law and enforced at the border of entry — see our notes on MRL and residue testing before loading. The second is that EU modern retail runs on private certification schemes that a trading exporter does not hold in its own name, which is why our EU coverage concentrates on the wholesale and processing trade rather than on retail programmes. The Netherlands appears most often here because it functions as the entry hub for onward distribution rather than only as an end market.

The United Kingdom and Türkiye

Two separate destinations, grouped here only because each carries its own entry regime rather than a shared one. The UK operates its own plant-health and border model distinct from the EU’s, so an EU-ready consignment is not automatically a UK-ready one. Türkiye is the shortest Mediterranean lane on this list, which is the whole commercial argument for it: fruit arrives soon enough after picking that it does not have to be picked early to survive the journey.

Russia

The broadest single-country coverage on this site after Saudi Arabia — thirteen crops — because the Russian market takes both the fresh citrus line and the frozen line, and takes them in volume through the winter. Practically, the constraints here are payment arrangements and routing rather than plant health or certification, and both are settled per contract.

South Asia, Southeast Asia and China

The longest sea lanes on this list, which decides what can travel: crops with the shelf life to take a long transit, and frozen product, for which transit time is not the binding constraint. Several of these markets also run their own import-registration or protocol requirements that are separate from the phytosanitary certificate, and those are confirmed before a first shipment rather than assumed.

The Americas

The smallest block, and almost entirely frozen rather than fresh. Fresh fruit into North America carries entry treatments and protocols that are crop-specific and pest-specific, and they are the reason the fresh line is thin here while the frozen line is not.

What to read next, depending on what you are deciding

The market guides above answer the crop-and-destination question. Four other things usually have to be settled alongside it, and they are the same whichever market you are in: which Incoterm you are buying on and where risk transfers, the payment terms and how risk is shared, which quality class you are specifying and its tolerances, and which Egyptian port your container loads from. For citrus specifically, the starting point is the citrus export guide and, for what a price is built from, how an orange FOB offer is constructed.

If your market is not on this list

The absence of a guide is not the absence of a lane — it only means we have not written that page yet. Tell us the destination port, the crop and the season you are buying for and we will answer on the lane directly — message the export desk on WhatsApp.