What to check before your first spice shipment from India
A buyer's checklist for a first import: certifications, specification sheets, packaging, Incoterms, container economics and sampling. What to ask before you commit.
A first shipment from a new origin carries more unknowns than a repeat order, and most of them are cheap to resolve up front and expensive to discover at the port. This is the checklist we would want a buyer to work through with us, or with anyone else they are evaluating.
1. Certifications, and their scope
Ask for copies rather than a list. The important detail is scope: a certificate can be current and still not cover the specific product or process you are buying. Organic in particular is granted per product and per handling step, so confirm it applies to what you are actually ordering.
For Indian origin, the set worth seeing is FSSAI, APEDA registration, Spice Board of India registration, and a food safety management certification, being ISO 22000 or an equivalent HACCP-based scheme. Halal and kosher matter if your market requires them.
2. A specification sheet, not a description
“Premium quality turmeric powder” is a sentence, not a specification. What you want is the numbers your QA team will test against: moisture, particle size or mesh, colour value where relevant, and the microbiological limits.
If a supplier cannot produce a specification sheet before you order, they will struggle to hold a specification after you do.
3. Packaging, in detail
For spices, the relevant question is the oxygen barrier. A plain polyethylene liner is permeable enough that volatile aroma compounds degrade measurably over a long sea journey. An EVOH layer is a substantially better barrier, which is why we use an LDPE-EVOH liner inside kraft paper bags rather than PE alone.
For dehydrated onion and garlic, the concern is moisture ingress and stacking strength, and an HMHDPE inner bag inside a corrugated outer handles both.
4. Shelf life and how it is counted
Shelf life should be quoted from date of production, not date of shipment, and it should come with the storage conditions it assumes. Ours are 18 months for dehydrated alliums and 12 months for spices, stored cool and dry at 22 °C or below with relative humidity under 75%.
If you are warehousing in a humid climate without climate control, factor that in.
5. Container economics
Ask for loading figures per format before you settle on volume. A 40 ft container of onion powder holds roughly 24,600 kg; the same container of kibbled onion holds about 16,000 kg, because coarser cuts are less dense. That difference changes your landed cost per kilo substantially, and it can change which cut makes commercial sense.
Full figures per product and format are on our quality and export page.
6. Incoterms, chosen deliberately
FOB gives you control of the freight and the visibility that comes with it. CIF hands that to the supplier and simplifies your side. Neither is inherently better. It depends on whether you have freight arrangements you trust and volumes that earn you a competitive rate.
We quote either, from whichever Indian port suits you.
7. Sample before you commit
Always. And sample in the exact format and specification you intend to run, not a nearby one. A granulated sample tells you very little about how the powder will behave in your filler.
Run it through your actual process rather than assessing it on the bench. Problems with dried ingredients tend to show up in handling and dispersion rather than in a sensory panel.
8. Documentation, agreed in advance
Confirm which documents come with the shipment: certificate of analysis, certificate of origin, phytosanitary certificate if your market requires it, and any market-specific health certificate. Finding out at destination that a document is missing is the single most common cause of a delayed first shipment.
None of this is exotic; it is just the set of questions that gets skipped when a price looks good. If you would like a specification sheet or a certificate copy for anything in our range, message us on WhatsApp and we will send it over.