About
A logistics business that happens to sell fruit.
Southern Season was set up to run a corridor properly, rather than to trade whatever is available wherever it will go. Citrus into India is where we started, because that is where the window and the protocol opened first. The business is built to carry the rest of the South African season behind it.
The group
Southern Season Fruit Trading is the trading name of Merchant Engineering (Pty) Ltd, a South African private company registered under number 2021/639889/07. It forms part of the Merchant group, whose interests span mining, rail logistics and commodity trading — including rail siding operations and bulk haulage into the Durban and Richards Bay corridors.
Fruit is a new commodity for the group. Cold chains, port execution and export documentation are not.
Why this corridor
Because it opened. India approved revised export conditions for South African citrus in August 2026, after nearly a decade of negotiation, and a market of 1.47 billion people with a counterseasonal calendar is not a small thing to have just become practical.
And because the 2025 season showed exactly how it goes wrong — which is a more useful starting point than a clean sheet.
How we work
Three commitments
Programmes, not placements
Volume and timing agreed before the season, and held. We do not divert unsold European fruit into India and call it a programme.
Documentation as product
Orchard-level traceability on every carton, because a protocol this new does not survive carelessness — and one exporter’s interception becomes everyone’s problem.
Honest specification
If a variety will not hold condition through a cold treatment voyage to a given port, we say so before the contract rather than after the survey.
The team
Who you deal with
The trade is run by the Merchant group's commercial team, with the group's logistics and compliance functions behind it — the same people who move bulk commodities from mine to port under the group's other businesses.
You will deal with the person who contracts your programme, and with the same person when a container is in the water. Introductions are made at first contact.