A declared table, not a borrowed one
For several markets we write about there is no national table, so it has to be rebuilt from what partner countries say they shipped. Not here. The 5,761,613 and the 1,957,168 are this market’s own declarations, which makes them steadier than a reconstruction and worth reading closely rather than hedging around.
They are firm about two things: value, and the country a consignment came from. No declared column carries case weights, unit prices or sell-through.
Two names, four of the six places
Set the two top-threes beside each other. Chocolate: the United Arab Emirates 23.5 per cent, France 23.0, South Africa 15.5. Confectionery: the United Arab Emirates 33.0, South Africa 18.0, Malaysia 8.3. Two countries hold four of those six places, and one of them heads both columns.
As a description of the shelf that is unremarkable. As a supply position it deserves a second look: when one origin stands behind a third of the sugar side and close to a quarter of the chocolate side, a single interrupted route thins two fixtures at once.
What a shipped-from column cannot tell you
A trade column records where a consignment was despatched from, not the floor it was made on. That distinction does most of the work here, because the name at the top of both columns is a consolidation point rather than a production base: goods arrive, are stored, re-invoiced and forwarded.
So part of what lands here has been bought once already before you buy it. How much, the table cannot say, and we would rather write that down than guess. What is certain is the arithmetic: every extra pair of hands is a storage period and a margin.
Fifteenth and nineteenth, read properly
Turkish origin sits fifteenth on 0.81 per cent of the chocolate column and nineteenth on 0.32 of the confectionery one. Thin — but not absent, and the difference matters. Goods of this origin have been described, cleared and shelved here before, so a first container is not a first.
Rank flatters and share deflates on a table this small. Neither is an argument for buying; both are evidence that the lane works. What decides an order is narrower: lines, formats, case weights and the date the reorder lands.
The smaller column has the wider opening
The confectionery column is the smaller of the two and the more concentrated — one origin on 33.0 per cent, ahead of 18.0 and 8.3. It is also the column covering dragées, boxed Turkish delight, jellies and wrapped sweets — the part of a Gaziantep range least likely to be sitting in a hub warehouse waiting to be forwarded.
Turkish origin holds 0.32 per cent of it. That is not a gap in the shelf, which is well served. It is a gap in the range on the shelf, and it is the cheaper of the two to test.
From the table to a written offer
A table says what has been bought, not what to buy. Send the lines you want priced; the format for each — carton, retail box or jar, the jar line being a spread; an indicative quantity; your delivery point; and whether the pack stays in our standard pack or carries your brand, in which case nothing is printed before you approve it. The offer comes back line by line: ingredients and allergens, net weight, case and pallet data, the minimum for that line and the delivery term.
Terms quoted are FCA Gaziantep, FOB Mersin, CIF or DAP, and Mersin is about three hours from our factory by road. The unit is one container, mixed across as many lines as you like (mixed container).
How reliable are these two figures?
They are this market’s own declared import values for 2024 rather than a mirror table assembled from what other countries say they shipped, so they stand on firmer ground than the figures we can publish for several markets nearby. Their limit is the limit of any declaration: value and country of consignment are recorded, case weights, unit prices and sell-through are not.
If the shelf is already served from the Gulf, France and South Africa, what is the argument?
Not that anything is missing. Two of those six top-three places belong to one re-consolidating hub, and a trade column records where a consignment shipped from rather than where it was made, so part of what arrives has been warehoused and re-invoiced on the way. A container loaded at our factory in Gaziantep ships on your order with one document set, and the price per line, the case weight and the delivery term are in front of you in writing.
Türkiye holds 0.32 per cent of the confectionery column. Why start there?
Because that column is where dragées, boxed Turkish delight, jellies and wrapped sweets sit, and a share that small says the range has barely been tried rather than that it failed. Two naming rules travel with the quotation: a vegetable-fat coating is named a compound or a glaze and never chocolate, and the jar line is a spread. Couverture, bulk chocolate by the kilo, raw nuts, dried fruit, cocoa, halva, tahini and baklava sit outside the range and are sourced on request; we confirm composition and format before quoting. Certificates are issued for our factory, and the offer states what applieson the day it is issued.
