By the time the doors were open the picture told its own story: two lids in the top row had worked loose, the boxes beneath them were dented along the edges, and the trays wedged into the gaps had slid sideways. None of that stack had been built by the haulier's crew. At five in the morning the central kitchen's own staff had piled the containers on the ramp against the service clock, pushing a few spare crates into whatever space was left. The receiver opened the damage report with exactly that point: you loaded it yourselves.
Loading sits with the sender, operating safety with the carrier
The Turkish Commercial Code declines to put the whole job on one desk. Under article 863(1), unless the contract, the circumstances or established practice indicate otherwise, loading, stowing, securing and unloading the goods belong to the sender, while the same paragraph hands the carrier a duty of its own: seeing to it that the loading is compatible with operating safety. Since the two duties run side by side, a handful of frames shot at the ramp can bind either party. How the containers were stacked lands on the sender's side of the ledger, and whether anyone objected to the vehicle leaving with that stack lands on the carrier's.
The reach of that second duty is set by its own wording. What the carrier owes is loading that is compatible with operating safety, so the question a driver weighs at the ramp is whether the vehicle can take to the road in that state. Does the weight sit evenly, will the stack walk forward under the first hard braking, do the doors close without fighting the load. Whether the bottom container will carry the rows piled on top of it is a separate question altogether, and in the division of work drawn by article 863 it stays on the sender's side. A stack that arrives upright yet crushed from below is usually born in the gap between those two questions.
Once the argument hardens, article 878 does the deciding. Point (c) of its first paragraph treats loading and unloading carried out by the sender or the consignee as one of the carrier's special grounds of relief. Two details in that wording repay attention. The word stowage does not appear there at all; it lives in the division of duties in article 863. And when the point names the party doing the work, it names the sender and the consignee, nobody else. That is precisely why a dispute over who stacked what is read across both provisions at once.
The real tilt comes in the second paragraph of the same article. Where the circumstances of the case are such that the damage could have arisen from one of those special situations, it is presumed to have arisen from it, so the presumption starts on the carrier's side and a sender who merely says the stack was fine and the road did the rest cannot displace it. The evidence has to come out of the sender's own file. The weight of a reasoned reservation on the consignment note follows from the same logic, and the good-order presumption in article 858(2) deserves a piece of its own.
| Item | Sits with | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Loading, stowing, securing, unloading | Sender | TCC art. 863(1) |
| Loading compatible with operating safety | Carrier | TCC art. 863(1) |
| Proof where the sender did the loading | Sender | TCC art. 878(1)(c) and (2) |
| Keeping the goods as received | Authorisation holder | Road Transport Regulation art. 40(9) |
Who records what at the ramp
On the sender's side the record comes down to a short sequence of frames. Before the doors close the whole stack is shot once from the doorway, then each row gets a frame of its own, and a last frame goes in as the lids come down. Put your own figures in and the arithmetic is easy: a stack of S rows calls for S plus two frames, and a gap packed with trays asks for a frame of its own. Since the law says nothing about the form this record should take, the yardstick has to come from elsewhere, and a working one is whether a third party who never saw the ramp can rebuild the stack in his head from the pictures alone.
On the driver's side the record begins with a single sentence, and what that sentence looks at decides its worth. A blanket note reading loaded by the customer records who did the work and nothing more, while the duty article 863 places on the carrier concerns whether the load leaving the yard is compatible with operating safety, so a note of that kind does not answer for the driver. A concrete objection reads quite differently: which row shifted, which gap was left unsecured. The signature under the consignment note is read just as narrowly, showing that the goods were taken over rather than endorsing the way the stack was built.
The moment that documents the condition of the load is the moment the lids come down; after that it is a closed box. Since nobody can see what is inside a container, what stays legible to the other side is the container itself and the geometry of the stack: is the lid latched, is the row in line, has a gap been left open. That is also why a record held by one party alone does so little work. When both sides can open the same frames in a shared folder named by trip number, nobody spends the dispute scrolling weeks back through a phone gallery.
Where the line actually runs
The hard cases are those where the damage could have come from either source. The second paragraph of article 878 was written for exactly that position: where the circumstances allow the damage to have arisen from one of those special situations, it is taken to have arisen from it. The doubt, in other words, is resolved against the sender from the outset. Was the crushing in the bottom row caused by a sudden stop, or by a tray forced into a gap pushing the row apart from inside? With no frame taken at the ramp, the whole job of answering that falls to the sender.
Bring in a third pair of hands and the picture is redrawn. Point (c) of article 878 names only the sender and the consignee as the party doing the loading or unloading, and a hired loading crew, a warehouse operator or the bodybuilder who fitted the refrigerated box is none of those. Article 863(1), for its part, gives the work to the sender unless the contract, the circumstances or established practice indicate otherwise, which means the contract can move it. In practice the conclusion is narrow: where the carriage contract carries no sentence saying who loads and on whose behalf, the argument over fault does not close inside the file. The same reasoning runs at the delivery end, since the point names the consignee once the receiver's own staff is taking the containers off.
This is also where the silences in the law become visible: no provision describes what a proper stack looks like. How many rows are acceptable, whether trays may be wedged into gaps, when a lid latch counts as enough; none of that is in the text, and the second paragraph of article 878 leaves the measure to the circumstances of the case. The decision at the ramp therefore rests with the carrier: accept the load and the door to a dispute is open, refuse it and the service window slips. What eases that dilemma comes from a layout description the two sides wrote before the run, and never from the statute itself.
A stacking plan belongs in the file, not in someone's memory
In a passive container with no powered cooling, the layout is already something people write down. Clause 6.8.3 of Annex 9 to WHO Technical Report Series No. 961 requires the qualification of an insulated passive container to cover a full description of the packaging configuration, the thermal conditioning regime, the minimum and maximum load volume, weight and heat capacity that can be safely placed inside, and the placement of sensors. The text was drafted for pharmaceutical logistics, yet the same logic carries over to meal distribution: how much goes into the container and where it goes stops being a shift habit and moves onto a page.
Where that line sits inside the document changes how it should be read. Annex 9 is guidance written for medicines, and clause 6.8.3 belongs to the part dealing with qualification of the container, which means the box is tested in advance and the result committed to paper. The guidance states how much load may go inside and where the sensor belongs; it says nothing about securing the container within the vehicle or about which party carries the fault after damage, and it binds nobody in meal distribution. What travels across is the method: measure the capacity of the box once, write it down, then work to that page on every run.
With that layout description in hand, the argument at the door stops being a contest of memories. If the crew followed the plan, the photographs show it; if it did not, the same record shows where the gap opened. Giving every line that leaves the central kitchen its own layout description gets cheaper per run as the container count and the number of trips grow.
Settling the container layout at the ramp once is the cheapest move in a central kitchen distribution setup.
For an operation that loads its own goods by hand, the position is plain: the law leaves it both the work and the proof. Whoever builds the stack also carries the job of recording what that stack looked like, in writing and in pictures, and the two minutes spent on that at the ramp largely decide who pays for a collapsed load before the vehicle has even cleared the gate.
