Port of Radès: Bulk Olive Oil Export Logistics from Tunisia

A container of Tunisian olive oil doesn't leave the country the day the flexitank is loaded — it leaves the day a slot opens up at the terminal. The Port of Radès handles the overwhelming majority of Tunisia's container traffic, including nearly all bulk olive oil exports, and its processing times drive the delivery schedule of every European or North American buyer sourcing from Tunisia. Here is what to plan for before booking a shipment, in peak harvest season or outside it.

Radès: the gateway for Tunisian bulk oil

Administered by the Office de la Marine Marchande et des Ports (OMMP) and operated by STAM (Société Tunisienne d'Acconage et de Manutention), Radès is built around a dedicated container and roll-on/roll-off terminal. It carries roughly eight in ten containers, by tonnage, moving through Tunisia's commercial ports, according to logistics capacity assessments compiled for the humanitarian shipping sector. STAM has modernized the terminal since 2019: a terminal operating system, additional RTG cranes, and an automated "smart gate" to speed truck flow at the entry points. On the shipping side, Radès connects directly to Marseille and Genoa through several carriers — Compagnie Tunisienne de Navigation (CTN), CMA CGM, MSC — with up to three departures a week on the Marseille-Tunis line and a crossing of roughly 36 hours. That geographic proximity makes Radès the near-default route for flexitank olive oil headed into continental Europe.

The real variable isn't the crossing — it's dwell time

Thirty-six hours at sea says nothing about a shipment's actual timeline. The bottleneck sits before loading: a World Bank assessment put the average container turnaround at Radès at 18 days — roughly three times longer than comparable Moroccan ports — a gap it attributed more to administrative procedure and chronic terminal saturation than to a shortage of equipment. The same analysis estimated that a 10% cut in those delays would lower Tunisia's import bill by roughly $500 million, close to 1.25% of GDP — a measure of the problem's macroeconomic scale, well beyond the olive oil sector alone. During peak congestion episodes, several carriers calling at Radès, including CMA CGM, have issued emergency congestion surcharges on the route, passed on to shippers.

For a buyer booking a flexitank, the practical consequence is straightforward: the gap between order confirmation and actual loading swings meaningfully by season, and no amount of vessel speed compresses it back down. Tunisian olive oil exporters themselves point to slow port clearance, alongside financing and bottling capacity, as a structural constraint on export growth. Building several days of buffer between a client's requested availability date and the vessel's actual departure isn't over-caution — it's a fact of the system, one to price into the contract rather than discover at booking time.

The incoterm chosen also decides who actually carries that dwell-time risk. Under FOB, the seller's obligation ends once the goods pass the ship's rail at Radès — any pre-loading delay is the seller's problem to absorb before that point, and the buyer only starts its own clock once the vessel sails. Under CIF or CFR, the seller books and pays for the main carriage, so a terminal backlog becomes the seller's scheduling problem to manage across the whole leg to the discharge port. Neither term makes the port faster; what changes is which party has to explain a slipped date to whom. A buyer should ask a Tunisian counterpart which incoterm they intend to quote before assuming who is managing the Radès booking.

Harvest peak, congestion peak

The period of heaviest terminal pressure lines up exactly with the period of heaviest olive oil volume. According to ONAGRI, Tunisia's agricultural market observatory, exports for the 2025-2026 campaign jumped 57.9% over the first seven months (November-May), topping 327,000 tonnes — shipments concentrated in the months right after harvest, November through January, which we cover in detail in our harvest calendar and pricing guide. That seasonal concentration means demand for flexitank slots at Radès peaks exactly when empty-container availability and loading bays are tightest. A buyer who books volume in October, ahead of the rush, starts with a real edge over one negotiating a booking in the middle of December.

Spreading the risk: Sfax, Sousse and the secondary ports

Radès isn't the only option. Three Tunisian ports play a direct or indirect role in olive oil exports and are worth knowing for a buyer trying to protect a delivery schedule:

Port	Specialization	Relevance to olive oil	Watch-out
Radès	Containers and roll-on/roll-off	Near-exclusive route for flexitank shipments to Europe	Longest dwell times, seasonal congestion peaks
Sfax	Multipurpose port (dry bulk, liquid bulk, general cargo)	Dedicated oil jetty (draft ≈ 10.5 m), close to Sahel and Sfax mills	Less built for standard containers, better suited to liquid bulk in tank
Sousse	Regional Sahel port, roughly 2.3 million tonnes of annual traffic	Olive oil is a long-standing outbound cargo	Smaller container capacity than Radès

The port of Zarzis, in the southeast, has also launched direct containerized links to Italy and Libya — a diversification signal worth tracking rather than a mature bulk-oil alternative today. For a trader with a base in Sfax and the Sahel, the ability to route a shipment through whichever port sits closest to the originating mill and its current queue is a real, not theoretical, lever: it avoids trucking a lot up to Radès when a nearer jetty can take the same flexitank without adding inland transport.

Documents to have ready before the port

An incomplete document file adds its own delay on top of the terminal's, and the two stack rather than overlap. Before booking a slot:

• ONH analysis certificate, plus an up-to-date health certificate where the destination market requires one;
• Certificate of origin issued by the chamber of commerce, the gateway to the duty-free tariff quota for Tunisian olive oil entering the EU;
• Incoterm and split of responsibilities agreed in writing before booking — see our FOB, CIF, DAP guide — so there's no ambiguity over who books the vessel and who clears export customs;
• Confirmed packaging (a certified flexitank, or isotank availability on the lane) and cargo insurance explicitly covering leakage risk, a point we cover in our guide to cargo insurance and letters of credit;
• Sealed lot COA, sent ahead of loading to clear up any quality question before the clock is already running on the logistics side.

A file prepared in advance doesn't remove port variability, but it stops a documentation delay from stacking on top of it — the one variable a buyer fully controls.

What an experienced trader changes in practice

The port isn't a last-minute decision. An early slot booking, a complete document file and packaging matched to the volume all set the stage before the truck ever leaves the mill. Virginia qualifies every request within 24 business hours from its offices in Paris and Sfax/Sahel, with a partner mill network giving access to more than 30,000 tonnes per season: the choice of exit port — Radès by default, Sfax or Sousse depending on the lot's location and the client's calendar — gets made at that stage, not after the truck is already loaded. Every lot stays traceable to its originating mill, with systematic tasting and a per-lot COA (acidity, peroxide value, K232/K270) sent before shipment, and independent SGS counter-analysis available at loading.

A shipment that holds its schedule

Tunisian port logistics is a variable to manage, not an obstacle to route around — and it's managed through advance booking, complete paperwork and picking the right terminal for the season. Request a quote stating your desired delivery window and campaign calendar: we line up the shipment — mill, packaging, port and vessel slot — to hold the date, including at the height of harvest season.