Two columns, and the smaller one is the chocolate
Start with the sizes, declared for the year: 736,368 US dollars of chocolate and cocoa preparations, 1,213,881 of sugar confectionery. The sweet column is the larger, and the two are not filled by the same countries — which is where it gets useful.
Both totals are modest for this trade, with a practical consequence: no single product supports a load of its own. The sensible unit is one container mixed across as many references as you want, the minimum per line, not per container (mixed container).
What a 94.8 per cent share can and cannot tell you
Cameroon holds 94.8 per cent of the chocolate column, with Turks and Caicos Islands and China at 2.5 per cent each behind it. Read that as geography before manufacturing. This market has no coastline: goods arrive by road from a port next door, and a declaration records where a consignment was shipped from — inland, not always where it was made.
A share that size can mean a factory next door, or a warehouse next door reselling goods from much further away; the figures do not separate the two. What they do show is the chain: nearly every chocolate carton here passes through the same hands, each pair priced in.
The confectionery column keeps different company
Cameroon again holds 72.3 per cent of the sugar confectionery column, but the names behind it change completely: the United Arab Emirates at 14.8 per cent, Morocco at 6.7. Neither is a neighbour, nor a short haul from a border post.
That is the most useful pair in either table, and it is your market’s record, not our claim. Long-haul consignments land here, clear and sell; nobody had to invent a route for them. A load built at our factory in Gaziantep moves the same way, so compare it on landed cost rather than novelty.
The leg that neither column records
Neither figure tells you how any of it arrives. No sea leg ends here: whatever the origin, the last stretch is a road one out of a port next door, through a transit movement and an inland customs office, with the importer filing the consignment.
That leg carries a real share of landed cost and appears in no import statistic, so it belongs in the offer — port of entry, delivery term, who arranges the road haul, whose agent files what, and which lines we would load dry and which in a reefer.
Türkiye is in neither table, and we would rather say so
There is no Turkish line in either column to point at — better written down than talked around, since you would find it in the same table.
What it changes is where confidence comes from: not a share in this market, but what is written per line before money moves: technical data sheet, analysis report, certificates issued for our factory with the certifying bodynamed. One discipline runs through it all: where a coating is vegetable fat, every document we hand you calls that line a compound or a glaze, never chocolate.
Turning two columns into a list we can price
A table says what the shelf lacks; a list says what to quote. Send the references, the format for each, a quantity, the port of entry and the inland delivery point. The offer comes back line by line: ingredients and allergens, net weight, case and pallet data, lead time, delivery term.
Terms quoted are FCA Gaziantep, FOB Mersin, CIF or DAP; Mersin is about three hours from our factory by road, and the offer names the rules and origin documents that apply as they stand on the day. Couverture, bulk chocolate by the kilo, cocoa, raw nuts and dried fruit sit outside our range: sourced on request, with composition and format confirmed beforequoting.
How firm are these two figures?
They are what was declared as imports for 2024 in this market, rather than an estimate assembled from other countries’ export records, so they are the market’s own account of itself. The limit is of a different kind: a declaration names the country a consignment was shipped from, not necessarily the country it was made in, and on totals this small a single large consignment can move a share by several points. Read the ranking as the shape of the supply chain rather than a settled scoreboard.
Türkiye is absent from both columns. Why quote a Gaziantep exporter at all?
Because the gap in the table is the argument, not a record inside it. The confectionery column already shows that goods from outside the region clear and sell here — the United Arab Emirates at 14.8 per cent and Morocco at 6.7 — while the chocolate column runs at 94.8 per cent through Cameroon alone. What is missing is a second source, and what stands in for a local track record is documentation per line: data sheet, analysis report, certificates for our factory.
The chocolate column is the smaller one. Should that change what we load first?
It usually does. A smaller column means a first container weighted towards lines that move faster and travel more easily: Turkish delight, dragées, wrapped confectionery and spreads in jars go dry, while chocolate and chocolate-coated lines are quoted in a reefer through the warm months. Tell us the port of entry and the inland destination and we will say plainly which lines we would load for that journey and which we would move to a cooler month.
