Antep Foods
MailCall
Senegal

One road leg, one sea leg, and the paperwork in between

A container leaving Gaziantep for Senegal is two legs and one paper trail: about three hours by road to the coast, a sea leg to the port of entry named in the offer, then whatever run your warehouse needs after discharge. What goes wrong on a first order goes wrong at the handovers — where one party stops being responsible and the next starts, agreed on a call and written down by nobody. Here is how each one is fixed before loading.

Home  /  Blog  /  One road leg, one sea leg, and the paperwork in between  · 

Where the goods stop being ours

Two delivery terms are quoted, and what separates them is not the figure beside each but the point where risk changes hands. FOB Mersin is the standard and carries the goods to the port. CIF, on request, adds the sea leg to the port of entry named in the offer.

From the discharge port, the onward transport is arranged by your forwarder — we quote FOB Mersin as standard and CIF to your port only on request, so the run after discharge is never left as a surprise.

Three hours to the ship, one packing list

Our factory is in Gaziantep and Mersin port is about three hours away by road. That short firstleg is what makes a mixed load practical: lines from our own factory come into one bay, are checkedagainst the packing list and go into one box, instead of being consolidated downstream by someone neither of us has met (mixed container). It also keeps the loading window short enough to photograph, and the balance settles against those photographs.

The origin columns read as route maps

Read the two columns this country declared for 2024 as maps, not league tables. Sugar confectionery came to about 11,880,026 US dollars from sources close by: 61.1 per cent one West African neighbour, 17.1 a second, 8.2 France. Chocolate came to about 7,266,340 US dollars and reads the other way round — 41.8 per cent France, 21.6 Italy, 8.8 India.

One column is fed by short regional runs, the other by long-haul sea freight, and Türkiye stands fourth in chocolate at 8.39 per cent against eighth in sugar at 0.44. The sea route is the one your clearing desk already works with daily.

Reefer or dry, and the leg after discharge

Temperature is settled in the same offer. Through the warm months a reefer is quoted for chocolate and anything coated in it, while lokum, dragées, jellies and wrapped lines ride dry — and one box can carry both.

Which way it goes is a route question, not a product one. If the run after discharge is not cooled, the sensible answer is to weight the box towards the dry lines and put the chocolate on a cooler month — which is why the offer asks for the delivery point, not only the country.

Who files the entry, and what travels with the box

The entry is filed on your side: your clearing agent lodges it and answers for the description given, and no supplier holds that position for you. The origin document and the rules that apply are named in the offer as they stand on the day — printed on a page like this one, they would age before being read.

Our half of the file never changes: technical data sheet per product, analysis report per line, our certificates. Certificates areissued for our factory, so the holder and the certifying body are named.

The panel in French, and what to send

The mandatory content goes on in French, with English alongside where your shelf wants it: food name, ingredients with allergens, metric net weight, storage conditions, your name and address as importer, the date marking. Own-label content is drawn from the technical data sheet and checked against your artwork before printing. A vegetable-fat coating is a compound or a glaze wherever it is written, never chocolate — in the European Union it may not be labelled chocolate at all — and the jarred line is a spread.

Send the lines, the format for each, an indicative quantity, the delivery point and whether the last leg is cooled. The offer comes back in writing (how we work) — ask for two terms at once.

Which delivery term should we ask for?

It depends on where you want the risk to change hands. FOB Mersin is our standard and stops at the port, which suits a buyer who arranges his own freight; CIF, on request, covers the sea leg to the port of entry named in the offer. When the goods travel on inland after discharge, the onward transport is arranged by the buyer's forwarder. Ask for the same list on two terms and compare.

Who declares the goods on arrival, and what do you send with them?

Your clearing agent files the entry and answers for the description given. From our side you receive the technical data sheet per product, the analysis report per line, our certificates. Certificates are issued for our factory, so we name theholder and the certifying body; the origin document and the rules that apply are named in the offer in the form valid on the day.

Does the whole container have to be a reefer, and can you add lines outside your range?

No. A reefer is quoted for chocolate and for anything coated in it through the warm months; lokum, dragées, jellies and wrapped lines ride dry, and the two can share one box. Tell us the delivery point and whether the leg after discharge is temperature-controlled, and the mix is built around that. Couverture, bulk chocolate by the kilo, raw nuts, dried fruit, cocoa, halva, tahini and baklava sit outside the range: sourced on request, with composition and format confirmed before quoting.

How to order

Send the list. We do the rest.

Send your product list with approximate quantities and the destination port. You get one offer covering every line, then one container, loaded and photographed before the doors close.

Mixed container — Loading Mixed containerHow a list becomes a container →