The Sesame Export Course: Every Number and Fork in One Page

We built a free 15-minute course that follows one sesame deal from a tahini buyer's first message to commission paid. This page is the written companion: the forks, the four numbers and the calendar, in the order the course covers them.

The fork everything hangs on

There is no product called sesame. The first question is always natural or hulled. Natural keeps the testa and is what oil crushers and many tahini mills buy, hulling it themselves before grinding. Hulled has already had the skin stripped, which is what bakery toppings need and what a mill buys when it would rather not run a hulling line. Colour is the second fork: whitish for food markets, brown and mixed for oil crushing, black as an Asian specialty.

The four numbers buyers live by

• Purity: 99, 99.5 or 99.9 per cent sesame. Produced by the cleaning line, so a supplier who cannot state a purity has never run one.
• Oil content: much of the crop runs around 48 to 52 per cent. Crushers live by it; for a tahini maker it shapes texture and flavour rather than a simple yield.
• FFA: the freshness meter. Low means fresh, well-dried seed; high means old or damp stock going rancid. The exact limit belongs in the buyer's specification.
• Moisture: commonly capped near six per cent, because damp seed moulds at sea. Admixture, the stones and stalks the cleaning missed, sits alongside it.

The cleaning line, in order

Air blows out dust, screens catch sticks, a destoner drops stones, a gravity table separates by weight, and the best lines finish with an optical colour sorter that ejects dark and defective seeds one at a time. Hulling is a separate optional step: soaking, rubbing off the skins, drying again. Learn that sequence and the price list explains itself. Cleaner costs more because every pass costs money; hulled costs more because it loses skin weight.

The calendar, which most beginners skip

Sesame is seasonal, not a supermarket shelf. In Tanzania picking often begins around the middle of the year, though Morogoro, Lindi and the other growing regions run on slightly different clocks depending on altitude, rainfall and the individual farm, so any month you are given is indicative. Early in the season fresh crop is plentiful and quality is at its peak; as months pass stocks thin, the best lots are gone and prices usually firm. The professional question is never just what is the price, but what is the price, for which crop, in which month.

Who buys, and what moves the price

China is the largest bulk buyer and its buying swings move prices at every origin. Japan pays the top prices for colour, uniformity and food safety. Turkey and the Middle East grind tahini and halva. Europe is smaller but growing through Asian and Middle Eastern cooking, Scandinavian baking and organic ranges. Competing harvests in Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, India and Pakistan all pull on the same market, which is why a Tanzanian quote can move for reasons that have nothing to do with Tanzania.

Chapter guide

• 0:06 What business are you actually entering
• 0:48 Sesame: from farm to international buyer
• 1:36 The product fork: natural vs hulled
• 2:37 How field seeds become export sesame
• 3:39 The numbers buyers live by
• 5:15 A purity is not a specification
• 6:06 How sesame is priced
• 6:56 The calendar: when sesame exists
• 7:59 Verify the supplier
• 8:54 Turning an inquiry into a deal
• 9:48 Payments, Incoterms and risk
• 11:18 Air, sea and the real lead time
• 12:26 Shipment and essential documents
• 13:41 Who is allowed to export
• 14:37 How not to get scammed