Dominican Culantro Wholesale Supplier: Sourcing Guide

By Arturo Peguero | International Trade Specialist | Former Dirección de Comercio Exterior | Former International Trade Professor

Last updated: August 2026

Quick Answer: Culantro (Eryngium foetidum), also called recao, shado beni and sawtooth coriander, is a broad-leaf herb, not cilantro. It is highly perishable: unpackaged leaves are unmarketable within four days at any temperature, and chilling injury appears at 3°C. Dominican culantro enters the US at 0% duty under CAFTA-DR, so the sourcing decision turns on cold chain, not duty.

Most culantro searches are not sourcing searches. They are home gardeners looking for seed, and that is the first thing a wholesale buyer has to filter out of the results. The commercial question is narrower and harder: culantro is a leafy herb with a four-day unpackaged shelf life, it is sold under at least eight names across the markets that buy it, and it is chilling sensitive in a way that ordinary leafy-green handling will damage. This guide covers the seven things a US or Caribbean importer has to settle before ordering broad-leaf culantro from the Dominican Republic: the naming map, where the crop is actually exported from, the cold chain, US admissibility and the fresh-herb food-safety record, trade terms, channel fit, and what only the supplier can tell you.

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1. The Naming Problem: Culantro, Recao, Shado Beni, Sawtooth Coriander

What buyers should know. The single most common failure on this category is two parties quoting different plants under names they each think are obvious. Culantro is botanically Eryngium foetidum L., a biennial herb in the Apiaceae family, indigenous to continental tropical America and the West Indies, per the Purdue University New Crops program. Cilantro is Coriandrum sativum, in the same family but a different genus, per Wikipedia. They are two crops with two shelf lives and two pack formats.

The name changes at nearly every border. Purdue records the same herb sold as recao in Puerto Rico, shado beni and bhandhania in Trinidad and Tobago, chadron benee in Dominica, coulante in Haiti, fit weed in Guyana, ngo gai in Vietnam, pak chi farang in Thailand, and ketumbar java in Malaysia. Wikipedia adds culantro as the name used in Costa Rica and Panama, plus cimarrón, Mexican coriander, and sawtooth coriander.

	Culantro	Cilantro
Botanical name	Eryngium foetidum	Coriandrum sativum
Family / genus	Apiaceae, genus Eryngium	Apiaceae, genus Coriandrum
Leaf	Long, serrated, thick, in a basal rosette	Soft, lobed, on branching stems
Common trade names	Recao, shado beni, sawtooth coriander, ngo gai, cilantro ancho	Cilantro, coriander, Chinese parsley
Flavor	The same aromatic profile, notably stronger	Milder
Handling	Chilling sensitive, damaged near 3°C	Held near 0°C in normal leafy-herb practice

What to confirm before you order. Get the botanical name in writing on the specification, not just the local trade name. In the Dominican trade the working test is whether the supplier says “del ancho,” the broad-leaf. If a quote comes back at cilantro pricing and cilantro pack sizes, the supplier has almost certainly heard the wrong crop.

2. Where Culantro Is Actually Exported From

What buyers should know. Be honest about the map before you build a program on it. The Dominican Republic is not one of the origins the culantro trade names first. The herb carries its most common English-language name from Costa Rica and Panama, per Wikipedia, and the commercial air-freight lane documented in the reference literature runs from the eastern Caribbean: one Trinidad exporter alone was packaging and air-freighting up to 2.4 tonnes of fresh culantro per week to the United States, as recorded in the Purdue New Crops 1999 review. Treat that as evidence the lane is long established, not as a current volume figure.

So the Dominican case is not a leadership claim. It is a logistics and trade-terms claim, and on a herb this perishable those are the two things that decide whether a program works. The DR sits on a short lane to the South Florida perishable gateway, it ships duty-free into the US under CAFTA-DR, and it already supplies the same Hispanic and Caribbean retail channel that buys culantro. On a crop with a four-day clock, days in transit beat production scale.

What to confirm before you order. Ask which destination lanes the exporter already runs. An exporter with a live Canadian or European herb lane is not automatically a US supplier: the US entry stack is different, and it is the buyer who carries most of it. See section 4.

3. Shelf Life and Cold Chain: The Constraint That Decides Everything

What buyers should know. This is the section that separates a culantro program that works from one that arrives as compost, and the published postharvest numbers are unusually clear. Per the Purdue New Crops review of the crop:

• Unpackaged culantro became unmarketable within four days of storage regardless of temperature. Packaging is not an upgrade on this crop, it is the baseline.
• Storage at 10°C extended shelf life up to two weeks.
• Chilling injury was observed at 3°C after eight days in storage. Culantro is not a 0°C herb. Standard cilantro and leafy-green practice will damage it.
• Polyethylene packaging, a 200 ppm gibberellic acid dip, and a reduced storage temperature of 20°C to 22°C extended shelf life up to 22 days.

Read those four lines together and the commercial shape of the crop falls out. Culantro tolerates a much narrower temperature band than the leafy greens it travels beside, it will not survive an unpackaged transfer of any length, and the difference between a four-day product and a two-week product is entirely postharvest handling rather than growing.

What to confirm before you order. Get the packaging format, the target holding temperature, and the shipping mode from the supplier in writing, and check that your own receiving and distribution steps are not going to hold it at leafy-green temperature. Air versus sea is a supplier answer on this crop, not a generic one, because it depends on what postharvest handling the exporter can actually deliver.

4. US Admissibility and the Fresh-Herb Food-Safety Record

What buyers should know. Two separate US agencies matter here and they do different jobs.

APHIS decides whether the plant may enter. Most fresh fruits and vegetables are prohibited from US entry unless a specific pathway has been approved for that commodity from that country, per the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The authoritative check is the APHIS Agricultural Commodity Import Requirements database, ACIR, which lists entry conditions commodity by commodity and origin by origin. Confirm the specific culantro pathway from the Dominican Republic there before contracting. A supplier’s assurance is not a substitute for the database entry.

FDA governs the food-safety side, and fresh herbs carry a documented history. In its fresh-herb surveillance sampling assignment running from 2017 to 2021, the FDA found Salmonella in 8 of 849 cilantro samples (0.9%) and Cyclospora cayetanensis in 7 of the 553 cilantro samples tested for it (1.3%), refused entry to 20 imported shipments, and prompted four voluntary domestic recalls, per Food Safety Magazine reporting on the assignment. Those samples were cilantro, basil and parsley rather than culantro, and that is the point: the whole fresh-herb category is under active FDA surveillance. The agency has also held Import Alert 24-23 for years, allowing detention without physical examination of fresh cilantro from Puebla, Mexico, from April 1 through August 31 annually unless the shipper is on the alert’s Green List.

What to confirm before you order. The US importer of record, not the exporter, carries the Foreign Supplier Verification Program obligation to verify that the foreign supplier is producing food consistent with FDA requirements, and prior notice must be filed for every food shipment offered for import. Settle who files what before the first load, and require the grower’s water and handling practices in writing on a category with this record.

5. Trade Terms: 0% Duty Under CAFTA-DR

What buyers should know. Fresh Dominican produce enters the United States duty-free under CAFTA-DR, which entered into force for the Dominican Republic in 2007, per the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The same USTR fact sheet notes that CAFTA-DR partners already had preferential duty-free treatment for most of their exports to the US under the Caribbean Basin Initiative before the agreement took effect, so this is a settled, decades-old position rather than a recent concession that could be traded away in a season.

On a low-value-per-kilo herb sold into a price-aware channel, removing the duty line matters, but it is not the whole landed cost and it is not the reason a culantro program succeeds. Freight and shrink are.

What to confirm before you order. Ask for the FOB quote and the certificate of origin process in the same message. Dominican exporters quote FOB from the port or airport of departure and the buyer arranges freight, so the duty saving only shows up on your side if the origin documentation is right.

6. Channel Fit: Who Buys Culantro at Volume

What buyers should know. Culantro is not a mainstream-retail impulse item. It sells where the cooking already uses it: Hispanic and Caribbean grocery, bodega and independent retail, and the foodservice kitchens making sofrito, stews and marinades at scale. That channel is large and it is documented. The US Hispanic population reached 65.2 million as of July 1, 2023, 19.5% of the national total and the largest racial or ethnic minority group, per the US Census Bureau.

The infrastructure follows the same geography. South Florida is the working entry point for Caribbean perishables: Port Everglades is the state leader in perishable throughput, moving nearly half of all ocean-shipped refrigerated containers in Florida, and reaches Atlanta within 48 hours and 70% of the US within 96 hours, per Port Everglades. On the air side, Miami International Airport handles 91% of all US flower imports by air, per Miami International Airport, which is a flower figure rather than a produce one but is the reason the refrigerated air-cargo handling capacity a perishable herb depends on sits where it does.

What to confirm before you order. Match the pack format to the channel before you price it. A foodservice kitchen buying for sofrito production and an independent grocer selling loose bunches want different units, and the case-versus-kilo conversion is the single most common place a culantro order goes wrong on paper.

7. What Only the Supplier Can Tell You

What buyers should know. There is no published Dominican culantro harvest calendar, no public FOB reference series, and no standard export pack format for this crop the way there is for mango or avocado. Anyone quoting you a Dominican culantro season or a price band from a web page is guessing. Those four facts come from the exporter, in writing, per program:

• Season and continuity. Whether the supply is year-round or windowed, and what the volume looks like across the calendar.
• Pack format and case weight. Bunches per case and kilograms per case, reconciled against your order unit. An order written in cases and a quote written in kilos have to be made to agree before anything ships.
• Shipping mode. Air or sea, decided by the postharvest handling in section 3, not by a general preference.
• Certification status. Which standard the grower holds, the certifying body, and the expiry date, verified with the issuing authority rather than taken from a listing.

What to confirm before you order. Ask for a sample against the written spec and expect to pay for it and its freight. On a crop with a four-day unpackaged clock, the sample is not a formality, it is the only honest test of whether the exporter’s cold chain actually works on the lane you intend to run.

Culantro Sourcing at a Glance

Factor	The buyer-relevant answer
Botanical name	Eryngium foetidum L., Apiaceae
Other names	Recao, shado beni, sawtooth coriander, cilantro ancho, ngo gai, chadron benee
Not the same as	Cilantro (Coriandrum sativum), a different genus
Unpackaged shelf life	Unmarketable within 4 days at any temperature
Cold chain	Up to 2 weeks at 10°C; chilling injury at 3°C after 8 days
Best documented handling	Polyethylene packaging plus 200 ppm GA3 dip at 20°C to 22°C, up to 22 days
US plant admissibility	Confirm the pathway in the APHIS ACIR database
US food-safety layer	FSVP on the importer, prior notice per shipment, active FDA herb surveillance
US duty	0% under CAFTA-DR, in force for the DR since 2007
Channel	Hispanic and Caribbean retail plus sofrito-driven foodservice
Season, price, pack format	Not publicly documented for DR culantro. Supplier-supplied only

Frequently Asked Questions

What do Americans call culantro? In the United States the herb is usually called culantro, sawtooth coriander, long coriander, or Mexican coriander, and in Spanish-language groceries it is often labeled recao or cilantro ancho. It is not cilantro. Culantro is Eryngium foetidum, while cilantro is Coriandrum sativum, a different genus in the same Apiaceae family, and the two have different leaves, different shelf lives, and different handling requirements.

What do Puerto Ricans call culantro? Puerto Ricans call it recao. Purdue University’s New Crops program records recao as the Puerto Rican name for Eryngium foetidum, alongside shado beni and bhandhania in Trinidad and Tobago, chadron benee in Dominica, coulante in Haiti, and fit weed in Guyana. Recao is the term to use with Puerto Rican and Dominican buyers and exporters, and it refers to the same broad-leaf herb sold elsewhere as culantro.

What is the difference between culantro and cilantro? They are two different plants in the same family. Culantro is Eryngium foetidum, with long, thick, serrated leaves growing in a basal rosette and an aromatic profile that is the same as cilantro but notably stronger. Cilantro is Coriandrum sativum, with soft lobed leaves on branching stems. For a buyer the operative difference is handling: culantro is chilling sensitive and shows injury at 3°C, so it cannot be held at the temperatures normally used for cilantro.

How long does fresh culantro last after harvest? Unpackaged culantro becomes unmarketable within four days of storage regardless of temperature, per Purdue University’s New Crops review. Storage at 10°C extends shelf life to about two weeks, while chilling injury appears at 3°C after eight days. The longest documented result, up to 22 days, came from polyethylene packaging combined with a 200 ppm gibberellic acid dip and storage at 20°C to 22°C. Packaging and holding temperature, not growing, decide the usable life.

When is Dominican culantro in season? There is no published Dominican culantro harvest calendar, so the season has to come from the exporter rather than from a reference source. Culantro is a biennial herb grown under shade, per Purdue University’s New Crops program, so it is not tied to a tree-fruit bloom-and-harvest cycle, but continuity across the calendar still has to be confirmed grower by grower. Treat any Dominican culantro season stated without a supplier behind it as unverified.

Does Dominican culantro enter the US duty-free? Yes. Fresh produce from the Dominican Republic enters the United States at 0% duty under CAFTA-DR, which entered into force for the Dominican Republic in 2007, per the Office of the United States Trade Representative. Dominican goods also held preferential duty-free treatment under the Caribbean Basin Initiative before that. Duty-free entry does not remove the separate APHIS admissibility check or the FDA import requirements, which are handled independently of tariff treatment.

Work With Verified DR Culantro Exporters

DominicanSources supplies fresh produce from our Dominican Republic producer network, graded and packed to your spec. We are a sourcing service, not a directory: we interview the producer, confirm trade activity, and check certification at the issuing body before we quote a program. On a herb this perishable we confirm the postharvest handling and the destination lane with the exporter before we quote, rather than sending you a listing and a phone number.

Browse verified DR specialty produce exporters

Send us a sourcing inquiry with your culantro grade, pack format, volume, and destination requirements. We will source against that spec and confirm what certification is available on the line before we quote it.

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Further Reading

• Dominican Thai Eggplant Supplier: US Buyer’s Guide
• Dominican Okra Supplier: US Buyer’s Sourcing Guide
• Dominican Quenepa Wholesale: Spanish Lime Buyer’s Guide
• Sour Orange Wholesale Supplier: Dominican Naranja Agria
• Caribbean Root Vegetable Supplier: DR Sourcing Guide
• GlobalGAP and DR Fruit Sourcing: What Buyers Should Verify
• Dominican Republic Country of Origin: 0% US Duty Guide
• Browse DR Specialty Produce

About the author: Arturo Peguero is the founder of DominicanSources, former official at the Dirección de Comercio Exterior and International Trade Professor at PUCMM with 20+ years in Dominican trade.