Export and logistics
How an order of cups actually ships: piece counts per box, container and truck loading, the customs headings, the delivery term you choose, and the documents that travel with the goods.
Disposable drinkware is light and bulky, and that one fact decides almost everything about how it travels. An order fills the space in a box, a trailer or a container long before it comes anywhere near a weight limit, so the useful question at quotation stage is never how many kilos you are buying but how much volume. What follows explains how that volume is worked out and what must be agreed before goods leave Türkiye.
From box to trailer
Each article has a fixed piece count to the export box, and the count drops steeply as the format widens. Nesting depth rather than weight is the reason: a tall shell sinks deep into the one below it, while a shallow bowl barely settles inside its neighbour. The same box therefore holds three thousand of the smallest hot article and three hundred of the widest bowl, and any calculation that starts from pieces instead of boxes will mislead you.
Boxes are stacked onto pallets and the loading columns beside an article answer the question for whole loads. A 12 oz hot cup fills a 20' HQ with 330 boxes, a 40' HQ with 800 and a road trailer with 1150; the same three columns read 350, 900 and 1200 on the 4 oz, and 350, 900 and 1400 on the 14 oz. Notice that the trailer figure beats the 40' HQ figure on several articles, because a curtainsider offers more usable space than a high-cube box does. That is one reason European buyers so often take goods by road while an overseas buyer books a container.
Choosing the delivery term
Four terms are offered when you send an enquiry, and the one you pick changes what the figure in front of you covers. Under EXW the goods are made ready for collection and your forwarder carries it from there. FOB puts them through export clearance and onto the vessel at the loading port. CIF carries sea freight and marine insurance through to the port you name. DAP brings the consignment to an address in your own country, with import duty and customs clearance still on your side.
There is no universally right choice. A buyer holding a freight agreement of their own usually wants EXW or FOB, so the sea leg stays inside a contract they already control, while a buyer who needs one comparable number against a domestic source asks for CIF or DAP. The term also fixes the point at which risk changes hands, which matters when a box sits at a congested port. Whichever you select is written into the offer and repeated on the proforma, so nobody is assuming anything later.
Customs headings and the papers in the file
Board goods travel under heading 4823.69 and clear cold cups under 3924.10, while transparent closures fall to 3923.50. Three headings can therefore appear on one consignment. Give them to your broker early, since duty rates and any import formality are read off the heading, and remember that the office clearing the goods has the final say on how they are entered. Every offer states the heading against each line so the classification is not looked up twice.
The paperwork itself is short. A proforma sets out the specification, quantities, packing and the agreed term, and it is the document your accounts department pays against. On dispatch you receive a commercial invoice and a packing list carrying box counts, gross and net weights and cubic volume, plus the transport document for the mode used: a bill of lading by sea, a CMR note by road. Where your customs authority wants an origin or movement paper, it is drawn up with the shipment. Say at order stage which documents your side needs, because several of them cannot be issued once goods have sailed.
Part loads and full containers
Not every purchase fills a box of its own, and a part load is a perfectly normal way to run a trial or a first printed design. It is worth knowing what it costs, though. Groupage freight on light cargo is charged on volume, so half a pallet of cups can be billed as though it weighed several times what it does, and buyers frequently discover that adding a second size moves the order into a full container at a lower cost per piece than the small shipment would have carried. Send the sizes and quantities you have in mind together with the destination country and the term you want to work on. The reply comes back with the stow, the packing figures, the headings and the production schedule, and where the mix would leave space unused we say so rather than load air across an ocean.