UKC

Has anyone any experience of shipping foods for an expedition? I am looking to move about 150kg of dried foods to Norway, but am wary of having to pay import duty. I am trying to ascertain the pros and cons of sending by standard mail and/or by including it in our baggage allowance. 

It's the risk of paying duty on something that is for our personal use only that I am worried about am not concerned about prohibited items as I have checked and am sure that nothing we are sending (custard creams) is prohibited.  

In reply to Zero:

Mmmmmmm..... the custard cream - a great biscuit.

In reply to Zero:

No experience of shipping but experience of posting. You can post parcels up to 2 kg in weight with items worth less than 1000 krone (about 90 pounds at current exchange rate), tax/duty free (unless it contains chocolate when you fall foul of the sugar tax). That wouldn't work for the amount you need to send. You could try a shipping company  that sends containers on a regular basis and fill a corner of their container. My son did that when moving furniture and effects from Cornwall to Norway. Expensive though. Easiest way might be to find someone who is driving out. Be careful, as the Norwegian government loves to put tax on everything coming into the country. Sorry, not a lot of help.

In reply to phizz4:

Very helpful. If a little worrying. I may have to see if my contac in Norway can do a bit of phoning around. Thanks for the info.

In reply to 99ster:

Garibaldis too. Mmmm.

In reply to Zero:

Can't say for sure, but I imagine if you ship your custard creams, you will have to pay at least Norwegian VAT on them (although you can claim back the UK VAT). They will also be stuck in customs, possibly for weeks.

If you bring them as baggage then it looks like you can each bring in total 6,000 NOK's worth of goods in accordance with the "Value Limit", they key being that you are bringing 'goods for consumption' rather than temporarily importing items.

https://www.toll.no/en/shopping-abroad/the-value-limit/ 

In reply to AndyC:  'goods for consumption' and 'value limit' seem to be the way of getting illegal drugs in? eg 'custard creams'?

In reply to AndyC:

My apolgies for ignoring your comment. I went off and broke a rib. I have been feeling sorry for myself and ignoring social media. It clearly wasn't going to last long. 

Thansk for the respoonse. Very useful. I did get in touch with Norwegian customs and they were remarkably vague. Strangely they never mentioned the value limit. 

In reply to magma:

People seem to be obsessed with my custard creams. I have a feeling I will be getting fed up of them after 90 days. 

In reply to Zero:

Why not buy dried food in Norway? I assume this is a cost problem?

To answer the OP though, my top tip is to not pack jars of jam and biscuits in the same blue barrel you chuck out of the back of a plane onto a glacier.

In reply to Zero:

I friend of mine is trying to get a lot of stuff including food out to Norway in early Jan 2022.

Last I heard he was thinking of paying someone to drive it out there as the cheapest option. 

You're obviously not alone in your musings.

Oh and good luck with the broken rib!

In reply to Toerag:

Same question. There is literally no need to ship expedition food to Norway, when you can just buy it there. A quick google suggests that if you buy decent freeze dried food (Real Turmat) they are actually cheaper in Norway than in the UK... 

And just because an item is for personal use it shouldn't exclude you from paying duty on it, unless its a temporary import. IIRC food doesn't count here because you aren't exporting it back to where it came. If you must take food from (presumably) the UK, ship it and pay the tax you rightfully owe, whilst remembering that "we" voted for this, clutch your blue passport and sing God Save the Queen.

But seriously OP, just buy your food in Norway.

In reply to ianstevens:

Income tax in Norway is relatively low, but with high rates of VAT. So buying anything in Norway generally feels expensive to us (who have already paid the tax on our income, and are then paying it again in a high VAT rate).  This isn't an EU/Brexit thing - it's just the way they do taxes in Norway.

When we had a climbing trip (pre-Brexit) we took a lot of food in our luggage to keep the cost down. It was a last minute decision (we had a bigger luggage allowance than we originally thought) so we just rammed in as much pasta, tins, chocolate, etc etc as we could.  But it was nowhere near 150kg even between the 8 of us.

The airline lost one of my bags (the one with most of my clothes & climbing gear) and buying replacements was eye-wateringly expensive - £4 for a pair of "cheap" knickers (would be £5 for 4 in the UK), for example, and £80 for a BD Half Dome helmet (nearly double the UK price).  I also swam in the f-f-f-freezing sea for 10 whole minutes because someone promised to buy me a beer at £10 a pint.

In reply to Becky E:

I'm aware of how tax and costs work - I live in Scandinavia a travel to Norway from time to time. There is an element of Brexit - if the UK was still in the EEA there wouldn't be any import tariffs/VAT(MOMS, to use the local name) issues in the same way there are now, which would make importing food from the UK less expensive and Norwegian shopping a less viable alternative.