Ingredient buyers who set their sourcing budgets on January’s freight numbers are already behind. Ocean rates on the lanes carrying ashwagandha, turmeric and other South and East Asian botanicals into the U.S. have moved in sharp, repeated reversals since the start of the year, and the pattern shows no sign of settling before peak season begins in earnest.
A Lunar New Year Spike, Then a Fast Reversal
The year opened with a familiar seasonal jolt. Asia to U.S. West Coast rates jumped 22% week over week to $2,617 per forty-foot equivalent unit in the first week of January, while East Coast rates climbed 12% to $3,757 per FEU, according to Freightos data reported by Supply Chain Dive. That is the kind of pre-Lunar New Year rush ingredient importers have learned to expect and, in theory, to plan around.
The spike did not hold. By mid-February, FreightWaves reported that the same West Coast lane had given back all of its January gains, falling 21% to $1,916 per FEU, while East Coast rates eased 10% to $3,457. Freightos analyst Judah Levine described the market as entering a “post-Lunar New Year, pre-peak season lull,” with the National Retail Federation projecting March import volumes down 5% month over month and first-quarter demand trailing year-ago levels by 7%.
For a moment, that looked like the story: a normal seasonal cycle, softened further by an already-soft demand backdrop. It did not stay that way.
Then Rates Doubled, and Demand Had Nothing to Do With It
By late May, spot rates for 40-foot containers moving from China to the U.S. East Coast had nearly doubled since late February, rising from roughly $2,600 to more than $5,000, while the trans-Pacific route climbed about $1,400 to $3,200. Both lanes were up more than 75% over an eight-week stretch, per the Freightos Baltic Daily Index, in a run FreightWaves tied to the ongoing conflict in Iran creating what it called a “slow burn” in fuel-linked surcharges.
What makes this second swing worth flagging is what did not change alongside the price. Capacity stayed ample. Import demand had been flat since early April. Rates climbed anyway, on cost inputs, largely fuel and route risk, that sit entirely outside a shipper’s control. That decoupling of price from volume is the pattern to watch through the rest of 2026, not any single rate level.
Demand Is Structurally Soft, Which Should Have Kept a Lid on Prices
The demand backdrop makes the May spike more striking, not less. The National Retail Federation’s ocean import outlook, cited in the Supply Chain Dive coverage, projected 2026 volumes down 10% compared with 2025. Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka told reporters in a December 2025 briefing that he expected only single-digit declines for the year, a milder outcome than feared, because inventories built up during months of tariff-driven frontloading were still working through the system, according to Supply Chain Dive.
The numbers back that up. November 2025 volumes at the port had already fallen 12% year over year, to 782,249 TEUs, even as the port closed out 2025 with just under 10 million TEUs, among its top three years on record. That combination, high carryover inventory meeting softer forward demand, has kept carriers from securing the pricing power a genuinely tight market would deliver. It is a big part of why fuel and route disruptions, rather than cargo volume, are driving the 2026 rate story.
Vessel economics reinforce the point. Maersk reported its first quarterly loss in years and, for the first time, factored a major economy’s recession risk into its outlook, flagging a potential $1 billion profit swing tied to whether container traffic returns to the Red Sea at scale, according to FreightWaves. Separately, the outlet has noted that Suez Canal diversions around the Cape of Good Hope, in place since early 2024, have eased transit times somewhat from their post-diversion peak but have not returned to 2023 lows, in its peak-season rate coverage.
Peak Season Is About to Open, and the Timing Looks Unfavorable
The traditional ocean import peak season runs from late July into August, meaning the market is now heading into the window when volumes typically build and rate pressure historically intensifies. FreightWaves flagged early signs of demand picking up as early as late May, well ahead of that window, raising the risk that a peak-season pull could compound the fuel-driven increases already in train. A resolution to Iran-linked shipping risk could relieve some of that pressure just as quickly, but buyers should not count on it landing on a convenient schedule.
Purchase orders for goods moving through the Port of Los Angeles are typically sent to Asian factories three to four months ahead of the scheduled ship date, per Supply Chain Dive, which means decisions being made on the docks and in procurement offices right now will show up as landed cost in the fourth quarter. That lag is exactly why treating this year’s volatility as noise, rather than as the operating environment, is the more expensive mistake.
What This Means for Ashwagandha, Turmeric and the Rest of the Basket
Botanical shipments do not move any faster than the rate cycle around them, and the production clock only adds to the exposure. For ashwagandha shipped from major Indian ports, sea transit alone runs 25 to 35 days to the U.S. West Coast or 35 to 45 days to the East Coast, with total lead time, including production, testing and documentation, typically running 60 to 90 days, according to sourcing guidance from IndoFolk Wellness aimed at U.S. supplement buyers. Air freight cuts that transit to 3 to 5 days, but at roughly five times the cost, it is an option best reserved for gap-filling rather than routine replenishment.
Turmeric shipments face a similar exposure profile, riding the same trans-Pacific and India-origin lanes that have swung by double digits repeatedly since January. Moringa and other India- and China-sourced botanicals are caught in the same volatility, since the driver is the freight lane itself, not any single crop’s harvest calendar or demand curve.
Given that rate spikes this year have repeatedly arrived with little warning, tied to fuel costs and conflict risk rather than predictable seasonal demand, buyers are better served by locking contracted capacity and building schedule buffer now than by chasing spot rates once peak-season volumes build further.
The Growth Story Underneath Makes This Harder to Ignore
None of this is happening against a shrinking category. The global nutraceuticals market crossed $450 billion in 2024-25 and is on a trajectory toward roughly $1 trillion within a decade, per sourcing analysis from Comexim. The ingredient volumes moving through these lanes are set to keep growing even as the freight market underneath them stays unsettled.
Rates have moved on fuel costs and conflict risk this year, not on how much cargo is actually moving. That is the detail ingredient buyers should be planning around, not the headline number on any given week.
Buyers who treat 2026’s rate swings as a one-off, rather than as the new baseline for planning, are likely to get caught flat-footed by the next one. The safer bet is to build contract coverage and lead-time buffer for volatility itself, since neither the calendar nor the geopolitics driving this cycle look inclined to settle down before peak season runs its course.