Trade Asist — International Trade Brokerage

Dried fruit, nuts, table olives and olive oil — sourced, contracted and shipped.

Trade Asist stands between the buyer and the supplier — as a commission agent, or as principal in our own name, whichever suits the deal — and stays with the transaction from the first specification to the last document. Sourcing, negotiation, contract, freight, laboratory analysis: five stages that have to agree with one another, run by one desk instead of five.

Buying a container of food is not like buying a product

A retailer buying dried apricots is not buying a bag of fruit. They are buying a moisture figure, a sulphur dioxide figure, a size number, a crop year, an aflatoxin report that will satisfy a customs authority two thousand kilometres away, a packing format their own warehouse can handle, and a shipment window that lands before their promotion does — and every one of those is a separate decision, wired to the others. Change the Incoterm and the document list changes. Change the packing and the container plan changes with it.

That is the work. Most of it happens before anything is loaded, and almost all of it happens in writing. A broker doing the job properly spends far more time on the document set than on the price, because the price is the part everybody already watches. The expensive surprises live in the other columns.

The sequence

Five steps between an enquiry and a delivered container

Every shipment follows the same arc, and it starts the same way: an e-mail that says roughly what somebody wants and leaves out most of what the trade will need to know. From there the job is to turn a rough intention into a specification, the specification into comparable offers, the offer into a contract three other parties can read, and the container into a document file the destination will accept. Each step supplies the raw material of the next. Skip one and it does not disappear — it comes back later, more expensively.

01 — Sourcing

We turn what you want into something suppliers can quote

It begins with a conversation about what you actually buy on: product, type, grade or calibre, moisture, packing unit, quantity, destination and delivery window. Most first enquiries have three of those eight, which is normal — the missing five are what the first exchange is for. Then we go to suppliers in the origins that can serve it, and check the match before an offer ever reaches you: does this origin produce this grade, is the crop current, does the packing format exist, can the destination's paperwork be produced for this lot. Offers come back in a comparable form, so you are weighing the same product on the same terms rather than three different products carrying three different price tags.

02 — Negotiation

Price, terms and tolerances, agreed together rather than one at a time

Price is a single line in a commodity negotiation and it is rarely the line that decides whether the deal works. Around it sit the Incoterm, the shipment window, the quality guarantee, the weight and quality tolerances, the claim notification period, and whether inspection is final at loading or at discharge. These interact. A good price attached to the wrong combination of the others is not a good price — it is a dispute with a delay built into it. We negotiate the package as one object, and agree the unglamorous clauses at the same time as the glamorous ones, because the unglamorous ones are the only clauses anyone reads on the day something goes wrong.

03 — Contract

One document that the bank and the customs office can both read

A sales contract in this trade has at least three audiences after the two who sign it. The bank asks whether the document list can actually be produced under the chosen Incoterm. The customs authority at destination asks whether the origin evidence supports the tariff treatment being claimed. The surveyor, if there ever is one, asks which standard the quality is measured against and on which sample. We read the draft the way those three will read it, and where their readings disagree we fix the contract before signature. That is the last cheap moment.

04 — Freight

Booking, container and the transport documents

The Incoterm decides who books, who insures and where risk passes; the cargo decides almost everything else. Dried fruit and nuts travel ambient in most lanes, and their real enemy is moisture and condensation rather than heat. Brined table olives dislike thermal shock and depend on seal integrity. Bulk olive oil moves in flexitanks, IBCs, drums or ISO tanks and has to be kept away from light, oxygen and heat the whole way. We settle the packing decision before booking rather than after, organise the booking and the loading, and make sure the transport document comes out in the form the file demands.

05 — Analysis and certification

The tests and papers the destination will ask for

Aflatoxin and ochratoxin A, pesticide residues, sulphur dioxide, heavy metals, moisture, calibre, drained weight, and for extra virgin olive oil the sensory panel — which of these your shipment needs is decided by three things at once: the product, the destination's rules, and your own specification, which is often stricter than the law. We organise the sampling and the accredited laboratory work, and follow the health, plant health and origin documents through the authorities that issue them until they are in the shipping file. Where a product is subject to increased official controls at EU entry, we plan for the border inspection instead of being surprised by it.

Where these products come from, and when

These are all crops, and crops have a calendar. It is easy to forget that in a trading office, where everything arrives as a specification and leaves as a document set — but the reason a lot is available in November and gone by April is that a tree somewhere finished fruiting in September.

The year opens inland. In Malatya, in eastern Anatolia, apricots come off the trees in July and August and go straight to drying; the export season opens behind the processing, with most of the movement between October and December. By August the Aegean has started: figs of the Sarılop variety ripen in the Büyük and Küçük Menderes basins around Aydın and İzmir — the only place that variety is grown — and are dried and then shaped by hand into the forms the export trade buys by name. Almost simultaneously, in Manisa, Denizli and İzmir, the sultana harvest begins. Autumn belongs to the Black Sea coast for hazelnuts, and to the whole Mediterranean basin for the olive harvest, where the milling window is measured in hours rather than days.

We source to the requirement rather than to a single country: Türkiye and Greece are where most of this list is at its best, but the origin follows the specification, not the other way round.

All Incoterms — starting from the most transparent one

We work with all Incoterms. The most transparent starting point for both sides is EXW: the goods price is visible on its own, and the buyer keeps control of freight rather than receiving it folded into a single figure.

Export clearance, freight and the document flow are then organised by us as a defined service — so the term stays simple without leaving the buyer to solve export formalities in a country they do not operate in.

Dried fruit, nuts, table olives and olive oil — sourced, contracted and shipped.

Buying a container of food is not like buying a product

Five steps between an enquiry and a delivered container

We turn what you want into something suppliers can quote

Price, terms and tolerances, agreed together rather than one at a time

One document that the bank and the customs office can both read

Booking, container and the transport documents

The tests and papers the destination will ask for

Where these products come from, and when

Apricots

Figs

Hazelnuts

Olives & olive oil

What we trade

Dried apricots

Dried figs

Prunes

Raisins

Hazelnuts

Pistachios

Table olives

Olive oil

What we do, and what we do not do

We do

We do not

All Incoterms — starting from the most transparent one

Tell us what you buy, or what you supply