Almost every buyer asks about air freight once, usually after a vessel rolls or a promotion date moves. The answer is that flying produce out of Egypt works for a short list of products and fails economically for everything else. The line falls where value per kilo, shelf life and the cost of being late intersect.

Chargeable weight decides the bill

Air freight is priced on chargeable weight, the greater of actual gross weight and volumetric weight. The standard divisor is 6,000 cubic centimetres per kilo, so a light bulky carton is billed on its volume. Fresh herbs and green beans are the classic case: a carton weighing four kilos can bill as seven. Dense products such as pomegranate or citrus bill on actual weight but are worth too little per kilo to carry the rate. Work the number on chargeable weight before comparing anything.

The crops that fly

From Cairo the products that regularly justify air are fresh herbs (mint, basil, dill, coriander, parsley), fine beans and sugar snaps at the start and end of the season, strawberries for a specific promotion window, table grapes for a first-of-season position, and occasionally premium mango for a launch or a trade show. What these share is high value per kilo, short shelf life, or a delivery date that carries a penalty.

What does not fly is the bulk of the programme. Onions, garlic, potatoes, oranges, pomegranate and frozen lines all move on sea freight, and the transit arithmetic in our note on port-to-port sailing days by destination is usually the honest answer to a timing problem.

Pack formats

Air cartons are not sea cartons. They are lighter board, smaller, and built to fill an aircraft pallet contour rather than a 1200 by 1000 footprint. Herbs go in perforated polypropylene bags inside cartons of two to five kilos, pre-cooled and packed with ice packs on some lanes. Fine beans go in five kilo cartons. Strawberries move in punnets inside trays, exactly as they would for retail, which is covered in our guide to Egyptian fresh strawberry exports and the November to March window. Build-up onto aircraft ULDs happens at the airport, so pallets are usually broken down and rebuilt.

The cool-chain gap nobody prices

The real risk on air freight is not the flight, it is the ground. Cargo can sit on an apron in ambient heat during build-up and again at the destination hub before customs release. Egyptian summer ramp temperatures are punishing. Book on a carrier with cool-room handling at Cairo, insist on the shortest possible check-in window, and use thermal blankets or insulated covers on the ULD. On a five hour flight into Europe the aircraft hold is rarely the problem.

The arithmetic

Compare landed cost per kilo, not freight in isolation. Sea freight on a 40 ft reefer spread over roughly 20 to 24 tonnes of product works out to a small fraction of a dollar per kilo on most European and Gulf lanes. Air freight is charged per kilo at a multiple of that, plus airport handling, security screening, terminal fees and customs at both ends. If the sale price cannot absorb that gap, the shipment does not fly, however urgent it feels. The exception is when the alternative is losing the listing.

Speak to the export desk

We quote air and sea side by side so the comparison is visible before anyone commits. For pack specifications, availability by crop and a quotation on Incoterms 2020 terms, message the PEI Trade export desk on WhatsApp at +20 10 9911 1918.