Pulses are the oldest traded food commodity that is still bought the same way it was bought a century ago: by sample, on a written quality clause, under a standard contract form, with arbitration as the fallback. What has changed is the buyer set. Alongside the canners, soup blenders and retail packers who have always taken this product, there is now an ingredient industry buying pulses as a protein and starch feedstock, and it asks completely different questions.
This pillar collects the Vorezan reference material for that trade as it applies to Ukrainian origin. It covers eight species in product records, six process and compliance guides, ten answer-first questions and the standards and corridors that frame the commercial side.
What a pulse specification is made of
Every pulse contract is built from the same four blocks, and understanding them makes it possible to read any offer critically.
Cleanliness. Foreign matter, stones, other seeds, dust and insect activity. Each is removed by a different machine on a cleaning line, and each is counted against a defined sample mass by a named method. A tolerance without a sample mass and a method is not a specification.
Calibre. The sieve fraction the lot is graded to. It matters most for chickpeas, where calibre is the primary commercial split, and it matters for every species because mixed calibre is the leading cause of uneven cooking.
Appearance. Colour uniformity, off-colour count, splits, broken cotyledons and shrivelled seed. Retail packing imposes tighter visual tolerances than any industrial outlet, because the consumer inspects the pack.
Behaviour. Cook time, hydration ratio, unhydrated seed count and, for sprouting grades, germination rate. This is the block most often left out of a contract and most often at the centre of a dispute.
Where the cost actually sits
Two offers of the same nominal grade can differ substantially in what they cost to bring to a finished specification, because the incoming material differs. The governing number is cleaning yield: finished graded product as a share of the raw lot entering the line. A weedy, soil-heavy or mixed-colour lot loses more on the line, runs the line slower, and produces a larger reject stream.
That reject stream is not waste. Off-grade and off-colour fractions go into flour, into protein extraction or into feed, which is why a processor with a flour outlet can quote tighter visual tolerances than one without. When comparing suppliers, ask what happens to the reject stream: the answer tells you whether the quoted tolerance is economically sustainable.
Additional unit operations each cost yield. Dehulling removes the seed coat and the fibre with it. Splitting opens the cotyledon and generates fines. Polishing improves appearance and removes surface material. Every one of those steps is a decision about whether the downstream application justifies the loss.
The species and what distinguishes them
Chickpeas are the calibre trade: kabuli type from the southern steppe, sold on sieve fraction into canning, hummus manufacturing and snack processing. Red lentils are dehulled and usually split, they cook fast and disintegrate, and they are the puree and dhal product. Brown and green lentils hold their shape and are the canning and food-service volume.
Kidney beans carry a specific food safety requirement in preparation and are the most colour-critical bean in the trade. White beans are the baked bean and soup line where uniform pale colour is the whole specification. Dried peas split the trade between whole, split and the flour and protein route. Mung beans are the outlier: a small crop sold either on germination rate for sprouting or on composition for starch and protein.
Compliance and contracting
Pulses entering the Union face official controls under the framework of Regulation (EU) 2017/625, plant health requirements under Regulation (EU) 2016/2031 with a phytosanitary certificate from the Ukrainian national plant protection organisation, residue requirements under Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 and contaminant limits consolidated in Regulation (EU) 2023/915. Every one of those instruments is periodically amended; the current consolidated text governs, not a figure quoted in a trade article.
Commercially the trade runs on standard contract forms. The GAFTA record sets out what those forms allocate between buyer and seller and, importantly, what they do not do. The Codex pulses standard provides the quality vocabulary that most contracts borrow from.
Packaging, loading and what goes wrong in transit
The trade standard is a 25 kg woven polypropylene bag, with 50 kg still normal into Middle Eastern and North African destinations where manual handling is the norm. Big bags of a tonne suit processors with bulk intake and remove most of the bag cost, and bulk-in-liner removes it entirely at the price of losing the ability to segregate within a load. Retail packs are produced against buyer artwork, and the labelling obligation for the finished pack sits with the operator placing it on the market.
Whatever the format, the declaration of compliance for the food-contact material has to travel with the packaging. Buyers routinely check this for plastics in a chilled or frozen chain and routinely forget it for a woven bag holding a dry commodity.
Transit failures in the pulse trade come from three places. A lot loaded above the moisture level it can carry heats in the container and arrives with mould and a smell that no downstream cleaning will remove. Condensation from a warm lot loaded into a cool container, or from a temperature cycle at sea, wets the top layer of bags. And insect activity that was marginal at loading becomes visible after four weeks at ambient temperature. All three are loading decisions, not shipping accidents.
What an intake laboratory actually does
The sequence is consistent across serious buyers. A composite sample is drawn to a defined plan across the lot, not from the container door. It is split, with one part retained sealed for arbitration. Moisture is run first because it conditions the interpretation of everything else. Then a physical count: foreign matter, stones, splits, broken, off-colour and insect-damaged seed, each against a defined sample mass with the method named. Odour is assessed, and a musty or chemical smell is a fatal defect regardless of what the numbers say. Where cook behaviour is contracted, a cook test is run on the buyer’s own protocol.
Residue and contaminant screens go to an accredited laboratory rather than being run in house, and the accreditation scope should cover the specific analyte and matrix. An unaccredited result is an opinion, and it will not carry weight in an arbitration.
Getting started
New to the category, read the cleaning and grading guide first: it explains what each machine on a line removes and therefore what a supplier can realistically promise. Then the seasonality guide for when to contract, and the cooking specification guide for how to make cook behaviour testable.
Working on plant protein, start with protein measurement and the flour and isolate guide. Sourcing organic, read the organic pulse guide, which explains why segregation rather than the field is where organic status is usually lost.