Buyer FAQ

An East African commodity export house headquartered in Mtwara, Tanzania, trading since 2010. We run six programmes from one desk, all of them Tanzanian: cashew nuts, sesame seeds, green coffee, green cardamom, Hass avocados and raw miombo forest honey. Every lot is tested before despatch and traceable back to the district it came from.

Each crop serves a different buyer community with different specifications, so several of our commodities have a dedicated storefront that goes deep on that one product. This site is the company hub — the place to see the whole portfolio, meet the team and start a multi-product conversation.

Within one business day, from a named person at the Mtwara office — not an autoresponder. First replies normally include availability, indicative pricing and the questions we need answered to firm up a quote.

Yes, for five of the six. Samples are drawn from the actual lots on offer and ship with the matching specification or lab report: green coffee as 300 g to 1 kg sample bags from the marked lot, honey as sealed jars from the drum you would be buying, not from a blended reference batch. Avocados are the exception — fresh fruit does not survive a sample courier, so that relationship starts with orchard and packhouse documentation, dry-matter results and a trial pallet or part-container instead.

We publish no price lists — every quote is built from the current market at origin, the specification and the freight lane. Send product, spec, volume and destination port through the contact form or WhatsApp, and the desk returns indicative numbers within one business day.

They differ by product. Cashew, sesame and coffee are container businesses — plan on one 20-foot container as the working minimum, which for coffee is around 300 bags of 60 kg. Honey and cardamom start smaller: honey from a single pallet of 300 kg drums, cardamom from a few hundred kilograms. Avocados move by the reefer, and a first shipment is usually a part-load consolidated with another exporter rather than a full 40-foot box. Starting small is how most buyers prove the relationship before scaling.

FOB from the origin port is our standard basis. CIF and CFR can be arranged on request for most lanes; EXW rarely makes sense for international buyers but is available for regional collection.

Across the dry goods, usually yes. Sealed honey drums, bagged sesame, coffee in 60 kg bags and cartoned cardamom travel together happily, and honey drums are a useful way to use up the weight allowance in a container that would otherwise cube out. Two rules we hold to: cashew kernels absorb odours, so aromatic cardamom stays out of that box, and green coffee travels with its own moisture regime, so we do not co-load it with anything that sweats. Avocados never share — they need a refrigerated container under controlled atmosphere, so they ship separately even when the contract is the same.

Every lot passes a product-specific laboratory panel before despatch. Cashew: moisture, defect counts and aflatoxin against the destination market's limits. Sesame: purity, oil content, FFA and aflatoxin. Coffee: screen analysis, moisture, defect count and a cupping score. Cardamom: moisture and volatile-oil content. Avocados: dry matter before harvest, then size, class and pulp temperature at packing. Honey: moisture, HMF, diastase activity and sugar profile, plus residue screening where the destination market requires it. Results are issued under the lot number with the shipping documents.

The Tanzania Bureau of Standards certifies our processing operation in Mtwara, which handles the cashew and sesame programmes. The other products are handled where they are grown: cardamom is cured and graded in the Eastern Arc highlands, honey is strained and drummed in the western woodland, coffee is milled and graded at origin, and avocados are packed in dedicated fresh-produce packhouses. Those packhouses hold their own scheme certification — GlobalG.A.P. and similar. We will name the certified farm and packhouse behind a consignment and pass you the certificate reference, but we do not present someone else's certificate as ours.

Each lot number is a key into our intake records: which grower groups or curers supplied it, which collection points it passed through, and its harvest or curing window. If a buyer or auditor raises a question years later, we can reconstruct the chain from farm gate to container seal.

The standard pack: commercial invoice, lot-numbered packing list, certificate of origin, phytosanitary certificate, the lot's lab reports and the transport document. Destination-specific extras — attested certificates for Gulf markets, FDA Prior Notice data for the US — are prepared when the contract names the market.

They are size and density bands, not cup scores. AA is screen 18 and above — beans that will not fall through a 7.1 mm sieve. A is screen 17, roughly 6.75 mm, and B is screen 16, roughly 6.35 mm. PB is peaberry, the round single-seed beans separated out by shape rather than screen. Below those sit C, E, F, AF, TT, UG and TEX, which cover smaller, lighter and off-grade material. A bigger screen does not automatically mean a better cup, but it does mean a more even roast, which is why roasters pay for it.

Both. The arabica comes from the northern slopes around Kilimanjaro and Arusha and from the Southern Highlands — Mbeya, Songwe and Ruvuma — which now account for the larger share of the crop. The robusta comes from Kagera, on the shore of Lake Victoria, where it has been grown far longer than arabica has been grown anywhere in the country.

Most of the arabica is fully washed and dried on raised beds, which is what the trade calls mild arabica and what gives Tanzanian coffee its clean, citric character. Natural-process arabica is available from the south, where water conservation has pushed more producers toward it. Kagera robusta is natural-processed as a matter of course.

Arabica is picked from around June to October — the southern regions usually start first — and robusta from around May to August. New-crop lots then come to market over the following months and trade through most of the July-to-June marketing year. The practical consequence is that serious volume is discussed early, not after the best lots have cleared.

In 60 kg sisal or jute bags, the Tanzanian standard. Hermetic liners are available on request where a lot is high-value or the lane is long and humid. A 20-foot container takes around 300 bags, about 18 tonnes.

No — green beans only. Roasting is a freshness business and it belongs close to the customer, not five weeks upstream at origin. Everything we ship is unroasted green coffee for your own roastery or your contract roaster.

The export window runs from around February through to mid-September, with the peak over the middle of that stretch. That timing is the commercial point of Tanzanian fruit: it fills part of the gap between the Peruvian and South African programmes, and it sits ahead of Kenya's main volume in some weeks.

Class I to the UNECE FFV-42 standard as default, which is the minimum nearly every European buyer will accept, with Extra Class on request. Fruit is packed in 4 kg export cartons to the count you name — 12 through to 30, where a lower number means bigger fruit. European retail generally pulls 16 to 20; Indian and Gulf buyers often take larger counts. Tell us the count and we pack to it rather than sending a spread.

A minimum of 23 per cent, tested per orchard block before picking is authorised. The regulatory floor for Hass is 21 per cent, but fruit picked at the floor arrives rubbery and ripens badly, and European importers have converged on 23 as the number worth paying for. Dry matter is the maturity test that actually matters — a calendar tells you nothing about whether the fruit is ready.

Fruit is field-heat removed within hours of picking, then held and shipped at a pulp temperature of 5 to 6 degrees, with controlled atmosphere on the longer lanes. CA holds Hass for up to around six weeks, which is what makes sea freight to Europe and India viable at all. Temperature is logged continuously and the reefer trace travels with the documents.

The farms and packhouses we work with hold their own certification — over six thousand Tanzanian growers are now GlobalG.A.P. certified and the export packhouses are built around that requirement. What we will not do is describe someone else's certificate as an Afri Exports credential. We name the farm and the packhouse behind a consignment and give you the certificate reference to verify directly before you contract.

Fuerte is available and is genuinely grown here, though volumes are a fraction of Hass and the export market for it is thinner. Hass is what the trade wants, what the orchards were planted for, and what we build programmes around. If you need Fuerte, ask — but expect it to be seasonal and limited.

Two things: the forage and the way it is kept. Most of Tanzania's honey comes out of the miombo — the Brachystegia and Julbernardia woodland that covers much of the west and centre of the country — and it is worked with hives hung in standing forest rather than trucked between monoculture crops. Tanzania is among Africa's largest honey producers, and Tabora in particular has a long enough beekeeping tradition that the region is routinely called the country's honey capital.

Raw here means the honey is never pasteurised and never pressure-filtered. It is warmed only enough to move it — well under the point where enzymes break down — then coarse-strained to take out wax and debris, and drummed. Pollen stays in, the diastase activity stays up and the HMF stays low. What you lose is shelf presentation: raw honey granulates, and it is not water-clear.

It will, and it is not a defect — it is what unheated honey does, at a rate set by its own glucose-to-fructose ratio. Packers usually either let it set deliberately and sell it as creamed honey, or bring it back to liquid with gentle warming below 40°C. Anyone who promises a raw honey that never granulates has either heated it hard or filtered it down to nothing.

Moisture 17–20%, HMF no more than 40 mg/kg at despatch, diastase activity at least 8 on the Schade scale, and a fructose-plus-glucose figure above the 60 g/100 g Codex floor. The light miombo crop sits inside the 0.8 mS/cm electrical-conductivity limit for blossom honey; the dark late-season crop runs higher and we state the measured figure per lot rather than a range.

Yes. Tanzania is on the EU's approved third-country list for honey, and the Tanzania Forest Services Agency maintains the national residue-monitoring plan that listing depends on. That covers the country's eligibility, not any individual consignment — each shipment still needs its own lot testing, health documentation and a compliant label, which is prepared against the importing member state's rules before the container leaves.

The main flow runs from around May into August, once the rains have finished and the miombo is in bloom — that is the lighter, golden crop. A second, darker and stronger harvest comes off later in the year. Buyers who want the light crop should be talking to us by March or April; the dark crop is usually placed in the last quarter.

Mostly Dar es Salaam and Mtwara. Mtwara serves the southern cashew season, when the crop is sitting a short drive from the quay. Everything that comes down from the interior — sesame, coffee, cardamom and honey — loads at Dar es Salaam, which has the deeper service network. Avocados are the exception: East African reefer capacity and sailing frequency still sit at Mombasa, so fruit is trucked north and loaded there, which is also what most Tanzanian avocado exporters do.

From Tanzanian ports, allow roughly two weeks to the Gulf, two to three weeks to India, three to four to Southeast Asia and four to five to northern Europe, subject to routing. Avocado reefers out of Mombasa run roughly three to four weeks to northern Europe and about two weeks to India, which is inside the fruit's shelf life under controlled atmosphere. Air freight is available for samples and small cardamom parcels, and is usually with the buyer within a week of booking.

Kernels travel vacuum-packed inside export cartons; RCN and sesame move in woven or jute bags sized to the contract; green coffee ships in 60 kg sisal or jute bags, with hermetic liners on request for long lanes or high-value lots; cardamom goes into food-grade lined bags or cartons to hold its volatile oil; honey ships in 300 kg food-grade drums, or 25 kg pails for smaller parcels; avocados go into 4 kg export cartons on pallets inside a refrigerated container. Container lining and desiccant are matched to the lane and season.

Yes. Cashew, sesame and coffee can be consolidated into a shared container when specifications allow, and honey and cardamom parcels routinely move as LCL. Avocado part-loads are consolidated with other shippers on the same reefer sailing. Tell us your volumes and we will propose the most economical arrangement rather than forcing a full container.