What are accessorials in green coffee freight?

When your green coffee is shipped from a warehouse to your roastery, the base freight rate covers one thing: getting the truck from A to B. Anything beyond that - a liftgate to lower the pallet to the ground, inside delivery if you don't have a loading dock, a fuel surcharge, a residential delivery fee - gets billed separately. Those extras are accessorials.

They're easy to overlook when you're negotiating the headline price of a lot. A roastery in a converted unit without a loading dock, for example, will almost always trigger a liftgate charge. That might be £30–£60 per delivery - not ruinous on its own, but if it's happening on every order and you've never accounted for it, it quietly eats into your margins.

When you're comparing freight quotes, ask specifically what's included in the base rate and what gets billed as an extra. The cheapest headline number isn't always the cheapest all-in cost.