The season, from July to January
The whole product list is harvested inside about six months, and the sequence barely moves from year to year even though the exact dates do. Understanding it is the fastest way to understand why some things are easy to buy in November and awkward to buy in May.
July and August — apricots.
In Malatya, on the high plateau of eastern Anatolia,
apricots are picked in July and August. The fruit does not travel as fruit: it goes almost directly into drying, and processing runs through August and September. The export season opens in September and stays open until March, with the heaviest shipping between October and December. Almost the entire Turkish dried apricot crop is exported, which tells you something about how the product is organised — this is not a domestic crop with an export surplus, it is a crop grown to be shipped. The names the trade uses, Malatya and
Ürgüp
, describe regions rather than botanical varieties; the cultivars behind them
include Hacıhaliloğlu, Soğancı, Kabaaşı and Çataloğlu, and a buyer will almost never see those names on a contract.
August and September — figs, grapes and hazelnuts, all at once.
This is the crowded
part of the calendar, and it is why late summer is the busiest quarter in the dried fruit trade.
Figs ripen in the Büyük and Küçük Menderes basins of the Aegean, around Aydın and İzmir, and the variety is Sarılop — a large, pale, thin-skinned fig that grows only there. Harvest is August and September; processing September and October; the export window runs October to March with shipping concentrated between November and January. What happens in processing is unusual for a commodity: the fruit is shaped by hand into forms that are then sold by name. Lerida is flattened and pressed into rows. Protoben is aligned with the stem and eye concealed. Pulled is domed on top and square at the base, softer and wetter, made for retail shelves. Baglama and garland are threaded onto cotton in chains and wreaths. It is skilled, seasonal, manual work, and it is the reason a fig contract has to name the type and the count per kilogram together — the same fruit, differently handled, is a different product at a different price.
The sultana harvest begins in the Aegean at much the same time, in Manisa, Denizli and İzmir, with Manisa carrying most of it. Picking generally starts from the middle of August, and the decision to start is made on sugar — a refractometer reading rather than a date. Roughly four kilograms of fresh grapes yield one kilogram of raisins. About nine out of ten of those grapes are dipped in a solution of potassium carbonate and olive oil before drying, which accelerates the drying and produces the amber colour most buyers picture when they hear the word sultana; the remainder are dried untreated and come out dark. Two different products, from the same vineyard, separated by a decision taken in the third week of August. Processing continues into October, the export window runs October to March, and shipping peaks between November and February.
On the Black Sea coast the hazelnut harvest also falls in August and September, on ground steep enough that a great deal of it is still gathered by hand. Giresun, Akçakoca, Ordu and Levant are the names the trade uses, and they behave as origin-and-quality designations rather than cultivar names; the cultivar most associated with quality is Tombul, grown around Giresun and Trabzon, and Giresun Tombul was granted EU protected designation of origin recognition in 2022. Processing runs from September into November. Because a properly dried hazelnut stores well, this product has the longest export window of anything on our list — September through June — with shipping concentrated between October and March. Dryness is the whole story here: moisture is the parameter that decides how the nut keeps, and aflatoxin is the parameter that decides whether it clears the border.
Late summer into early autumn — pistachios.
Pistachios ripen from late summer into
early autumn depending on the origin. In Türkiye the trade works with two names, Antep and Siirt, treated as distinct commercial types. In Greece the reference product is the pistachio of Aegina, the small island in the Saronic Gulf whose volcanic soil is credited with the intense green of the kernel; the Aegina harvest runs from the middle of August to the end of September, and the nut carries a protected designation of origin. The peeled green kernel — the one that goes into baklava and ice cream — is a separate trade item, bought for its colour as much as its flavour, and it is priced accordingly.
September onwards — the olives.
A table olive's type is decided by when it is picked,
which makes the olive harvest the longest and most differentiated on this page. In northern Greece, Chalkidiki green olives are hand-picked between the middle of September and the middle of October — at full size, before the colour turns, while the flesh is still firm enough to come through alkali treatment and fermentation intact. Konservolia, grown around Amfissa, Arta, Stylida and Pilio, is picked green from mid-September to mid-October and black from mid-November to mid-January. Kalamata (Kalamon) comes off in November and December, sometimes into January. Several of these names carry registered designations, and registered names are checked against the EU register before they go anywhere near a label or a certificate.
October to January — olive oil.
Across the Peloponnese and Crete the olive oil
harvest runs broadly from October into January, and new-crop oil starts reaching the market from November. Olive oil is the only product on this list with a single annual harvest and no second run: whatever is pressed this winter is what exists until next winter. That is why the harvest year sits inside the oil's commercial identity rather than beside it, why the date of the analysis matters as much as its numbers, and why the same tank of oil is a different commercial proposition in March and in the following October.
One product with no calendar on this page.
We do not publish a harvest or shipping
calendar for prunes. Prune supply follows the crop calendar of whichever origin is offered, northern or southern hemisphere, and we were not able to source a calendar we would be willing to print. Crop year and availability are confirmed at quotation instead. A missing calendar is a smaller problem than a wrong one.
Five landscapes
The Aegean — figs and sultanas
Inland from İzmir the country opens into two river basins, the Büyük Menderes and the Küçük Menderes, and it is there that the Sarılop fig grows and effectively nowhere else. The same region, running north towards Manisa, carries the sultana vineyards. Both crops are dried in the open in the late-summer heat and both are then handled a great deal by hand — figs shaped and threaded, grapes sorted and graded on colour. The commercial consequence is that in these two products the processing decision is as important as the growing one, and the specification has to describe both.
Malatya and eastern Anatolia — apricots
Apricots are grown at altitude, in a continental climate with hot dry summers, and dried in the sun in the orchards and yards where they are picked. The sulphuring decision is taken at this stage and it is irreversible: sulphured fruit keeps its bright orange, and unsulphured fruit turns brown and becomes a different quality class with a different buyer. Neither is a defect. A buyer who wants the brown fruit and receives the bright one has not received a better product; they have received the wrong one.
The Black Sea coast — hazelnuts
Steep, wet, green country between the mountains and the sea, planted in hazelnut for as far as the coast runs. The climate that makes the crop possible is also what makes drying the critical operation: a nut that goes into storage above its moisture limit is a nut with an aflatoxin problem waiting for it. Everything downstream in a hazelnut specification — moisture, screen size, class, aflatoxin — traces back to how well that first drying was done.
Southeastern Anatolia and Aegina — pistachios
Two very different places producing the same nut for different ends of the same market. Around Gaziantep and Siirt the pistachio is a long-established crop with its own trade names and its own processing habits, including the peeled green kernel that the confectionery industry buys by colour. On Aegina, an island of a few square kilometres of volcanic soil, the crop is small, protected by designation of origin, and harvested from mid-August to the end of September. Where a registered geographical name is going to be used commercially, we confirm its exact registered spelling and scope against the EU register first — a point worth making twice, because getting a protected name slightly wrong on a label is a legal problem rather than a typographical one.
Greece — table olives and olive oil
Table olives and oil come off the same tree and are, commercially, unrelated products. Chalkidiki in the north, Amfissa and the eastern mainland, the Peloponnese, Crete, the islands: each with its own varieties, its own picking window and, in several cases, its own registered designation. Green olives are picked in September and October, black ones from November through January, and the oil harvest overlaps the black olive harvest almost exactly. From a buyer's point of view the useful thing to hold on to is that a table olive is defined by three decisions — when it was picked, how it was prepared, how it is presented — and the first of those was taken in the field, months before the specification was written.
What origin changes on the invoice
Origin is often used on food packaging as atmosphere. In a trade file it is four concrete things, and each of them has a cost attached.
It changes the document set.
Goods from a given origin enter a given market under a
given regime. For agricultural goods moving from Türkiye into the EU, the preferential origin document is EUR.1, not the A.TR that covers goods in free circulation under the Customs Union — and dried fruit, nuts, table olives and olive oil are agricultural goods. Presenting the wrong form means paying the full third-country duty on a shipment that was entitled to preferential treatment. It is a one-line error with a four-figure consequence, and it is entirely avoidable at contract stage.
It changes the border.
Some products from some origins are subject to increased
official controls on entry to the EU, which means official certification and sampling performed in the country of origin, entry through a designated border control post, a CHED notification in TRACES, and a real probability of physical checks. Dried figs and pistachios of Turkish origin are the two on our list. The applicable lists and frequencies are amended regularly, so we verify them against the current annex for each shipment rather than working from a number somebody memorised two years ago.
It changes what names you may use.
Registered designations of origin and geographical
indications — Giresun Tombul, the Aegina pistachio, the Greek olive designations — are legal instruments, not marketing phrases. They can only be used for product that qualifies, spelled the way the register spells them, evidenced the way the register requires. Where a buyer wants a registered name on a label, that is a documentation question before it is a sourcing question.
It changes what is physically possible.
Not every origin produces every grade. A size,
a colour class or a processing style that is routine in one region may not exist in another, and a specification written against one origin's habits can be unfillable in a second. Checking that match before an offer goes out is one of the least visible and most useful parts of sourcing.
We source where the requirement points
Türkiye and Greece appear throughout this page because they are the two origins that dominate these particular products, and they are the two we work with most. But the sourcing brief decides the origin, not the reverse. Where the grade, the price point, the packing format or the certification a buyer needs sits in a different origin — another Mediterranean producer, another hemisphere, another crop calendar entirely — we source there, and we tell you what changes when we do: the document set, the transit time, the control regime at entry, and whether the crop year on offer is the one you were expecting.
A buyer is entitled to ask for a specific origin, and many do, for reasons ranging from customer expectation to duty treatment to the simple fact that a previous shipment worked. A buyer is equally entitled to say "wherever this specification can be met properly", and that instruction is often the one that gets the better lot.
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