When İçli köfte, mantı or another handmade product finds buyers on social media, the question stops being the recipe and becomes how the product reaches another city. Shipping starts with a legal question and is then built from four decisions.
First, registration: a sale is not personal consumption
Article 2(2) of Law No. 5996 on Veterinary Services, Plant Health, Food and Feed excludes food prepared for personal consumption. Production for sale falls outside that exemption. The Regulation on the Registration and Approval of Food Businesses repeats the exemption in its Article 2, and its Article 5 brings every business that is not on the approval list into registration.
Registration is made with the provincial directorate of the ministry, with the documents listed in Annex 3 for food producers; the competent authority reviews the application within fifteen working days (Article 6). Article 30(1) of the Law obliges businesses subject to registration to have their business records entered with the ministry.
Frozen regime and -18 °C
For home production, frozen shipping is the option that withstands warming on the road the longest. The Turkish Food Codex Communiqué on Quick-Frozen Foods (No. 2014/47) requires every point of a quick-frozen product to stay at -18 °C or below, and a short temperature rise during transport and distribution may not exceed 3 °C. The communiqué covers products frozen by a quick-freezing process, so a product frozen at home may fall outside its definition. Two figures give a worked upper limit: a box that leaves at -18 °C has -15 °C as its ceiling on arrival (a worked example, not a direct rule of the communiqué). For the tolerance rule in detail, see -18 °C and the 3-degree tolerance.
Dispatch day
A courier's delivery time is an estimate, not a commitment, and a parcel that falls on the weekend waits at the branch. The example below shows the effect of the dispatch day for a parcel that takes two working days (an assumption, not a carrier figure):
| Dispatch day | Arrival (example) | Calendar days over the weekend | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Wednesday | 0 | Weekday arrival |
| Thursday | Monday | 2 | Parcel waits two days at the branch |
| Friday | Tuesday | 2 | Parcel waits two days at the branch |
Choose the dispatch day so that the latest delivery lands on a weekday. In this example a Monday dispatch removes the weekend wait altogether.
The box and the cold source
The carrier's standard does not guarantee the box. ISO 23412 covers indirect refrigerated delivery by land with intermediate transfer, but it excludes parcels that carry their own refrigeration material inside sealed thermal packaging (scope, item b); such parcels may still travel through a refrigerated service. The seller therefore has to test the arrangement itself. The packs must be fully frozen and the box filled without voids; a half-frozen pack means thawed product on arrival.
The trial before selling
Keep a full box closed for the target journey time, measure the product temperature with a probe placed at its centre, then open the box and check the product's state. Run the trial in summer heat, because a routine that passes in winter may fail in July.
Label and order form
On a quick-frozen product the label must say, under Article 12 of the communiqué, that the product must not be refrozen after thawing. The order form should state four things:
- The days on which orders go to the courier
- Whether the product leaves frozen or chilled
- What the buyer does first on delivery: open the box and check the product's state
- Whether the box and the cold source are returnable
