16 September 2026 · 5 min read
Why you can't size a market by tonnage: two products hiding under one HS code
Twenty-seven per cent of December's declared vanilla weight wasn't vanilla beans. Anyone averaging across the code would have been badly wrong — in a predictable direction.
An HS code is a legal category, not a commercial one. HS 0905.10 covers vanilla that is neither crushed nor ground. In December 2025 it carried 123 customs filings worth $2.38 million. Read at code level, the month looks like a 79.5-tonne market with an average price of $28.40 per kilogram. Neither number describes anything an exporter can actually sell into.
Twelve of those filings declared a price below $5 per kilogram. Between them they carried 21.8 tonnes — 27 per cent of all declared weight — but only $25,886, which is 1.1 per cent of the value. No cured vanilla bean sells for a dollar a kilogram. This is a second product moving under the same code.
What the sub-$5 filings really are
Six of the twelve are one flow: 20.6 tonnes declared as vanilla powder, shipped from the United Arab Emirates to Kenya and Uganda between related trading companies at $0.84 to $1.15 per kilogram. At that price the product is vanillin or a blended flavour powder, and the shipment is stock moving around inside one group, not a sale.
Three more filings aren't vanilla at all: two are sesame seed moving between two arms of the same trader, and one is spice gift sets. They sit under this code in the official record, so they sit in the value total. The report names them so the $2.38 million is read with them in mind.
How much it distorts the picture
The weight-weighted average across every filing with a declared weight is $28.40 per kilogram. Leave out the twelve sub-$5 filings and it rises to $38.66. The median for the month is $49.50. Three numbers, one code — and only the last one is a price a vanilla exporter will actually meet in a negotiation.
| Declared unit price | Filings | Value, USD | Share of value | Declared kg | Share of weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Below $5 | 12 | 25,886 | 1.1% | 21,754 | 27.4% |
| $5 to $25 | 6 | 9,837 | 0.4% | 628 | 0.8% |
| $25 to $60 | 27 | 2,053,736 | 86.2% | 55,289 | 69.6% |
| $60 and above | 27 | 160,762 | 6.8% | 1,794 | 2.3% |
| No declared weight | 50 | 124,351 | 5.2% | — | — |
Size the market on the band that matters
The $25-to-$60 band is where cured beans go to extractors and food manufacturers: 27 filings, 55.3 tonnes and $2.05 million — 86 per cent of the month's value on 70 per cent of its weight. That is the real market. Everything below it is powder and parcels. Everything above it is gourmet retail in five-to-160-kilogram lots, where margins are wide but volumes will never keep a factory busy.
The rule is simple and applies to any product. Before you quote a code's tonnage or average price, look at how the unit prices are spread. If they cluster in two or three separate groups, the code contains more than one business, and each has to be sized on its own band. The method section of every SeaLines report states which filings were left out of the price figures and why, so you can check the boundary rather than take it on trust.
Commission this analysis for your own codes
Every SeaLines assessment applies the same method to the HS codes you register. Read the full sample edition, or open a desk.