The Routes
The house runs its own freight. We do not subcontract the booking; we sign the carrier contracts ourselves, we walk the consolidation yard ourselves, and we receive at Rotterdam ourselves. The routes that follow are the ones we have been working with since the first year and a half.
From Cairo, our reefer containers cross the Mediterranean in nine days, arriving at Rotterdam in time for the Friday distribution-centre slots that matter to our larger Dutch customers. Most of the fresh programme moves this way. The herbs go by air out of Cairo, and a small slow flow of dried and frozen goods takes the longer surface route via Gdansk, which we use for the freeze-dried programme that runs through a Polish processor we have known since the firm started.
Most of the fresh programme leaves the country here. A reefer container loaded at the Damietta consolidation yard on a Tuesday evening clears the port on Wednesday morning, transits the Mediterranean and arrives at Rotterdam on the following Thursday or Friday, depending on the Suez schedule. We hold five regular slots a week with a single carrier during the peak fresh window from January to May, and we step that back to two slots during the shoulder months. Reefer set point is 1 °C for strawberry and 2 °C for artichoke; the ethylene policy is dictated by what else is in the box.
Alexandria carries the IQF programme and the bulk dried goods — dates from Siwa, hibiscus from Aswan, the sun-dried tomato pouches from Fayoum. Frozen runs at −18 °C in a separate carrier contract; dried is ambient. The transit time is the same as Damietta but the consolidation is slower and we book a week further out.
The Dutch-side inputs — seed potato, greenhouse film, drip irrigation, climate-control hardware — ride this lane the other direction. Containers leave Rotterdam in the second week of each month from June through October to land at Port Said in good time for the Egyptian winter planting. We share the container with one other Dutch supplier in the off-peak months to keep the cost honest.
Fresh herbs cannot wait nine days at sea. The mint, basil, dill, coriander and parsley out of Wadi Natrun move by air on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday flights from Cairo to Brussels, then by road to our cool store in Haarlem. From there a small delivery van runs the morning rounds in the Randstad. The flight cost is the first thing that comes out of the herb margin; the second is the cool-chain hand-off at Brussels, which we audit every quarter.
Strawberry, pomegranate and hibiscus that are destined for the freeze-dried programme take a longer route. The fruit travels frozen from Damietta to Gdansk, processes through our Polish partner's freeze-drier in two weeks, and then rolls the finished product the eight hundred kilometres to Rotterdam by road for European distribution. The cost is higher than the direct lane and the calendar longer, but the finished product holds its colour and its flavour in a way that drum-drying simply does not. We run this route for a handful of specialty customers who care about the difference.
Worth naming, even if it is not freight. The phytosanitary file, the certificate of analysis, the certifier's inspection report and the customs paperwork move ahead of the container by email and, in the case of the plant-passport originals, by signed pouch. We file every shipment three times: once in Cairo, once in Haarlem, and once with the buyer. Six years of records, by regulation; we keep ten.
If a lane you need is not on this list, write to the desk. We have moved one-off containers via Marseille, Le Havre and Hamburg in the past eighteen months — the cost arithmetic is just different, and the timing is harder to commit to.