Georgia Commercial Kitchen Equipment Import Guide 2026: Zero Duty, 18% VAT, Voluntary Standards, Poti and Batumi Draft Limits and Hotel Project Costs

Georgia is the easiest country we ship commercial kitchen equipment to — and that is exactly why buyers get burned there.

In most of our markets, the import regime does part of your quality control for you. Saudi Arabia has SASO. Nigeria has SONCAP. Kazakhstan has EAC marking. Brazil has INMETRO. Those schemes are expensive and slow, but they mean somebody at the border is checking that what arrived is what was specified.

Georgia does almost none of that. Duties on most goods are zero. Standards and certification are largely voluntary. Clearance is fast and genuinely digital. The result is that a container of underspecified equipment clears Poti as smoothly as a container of good equipment — and the only gate between you and a hotel kitchen that fails in its second summer is the specification you wrote and the inspection you paid for.

This guide covers what you actually pay, what the certification regime does and does not require, how the Black Sea ports constrain your shipping plan, and realistic 2026 FOB budgets for hotel and restaurant projects in Tbilisi and Batumi.

Why Georgia, and why now

Two things are driving kitchen equipment demand.

The first is tourism. Georgia recorded tourism revenues of about USD 4.69 billion in 2025, up roughly 6% on 2024, and Tbilisi was named the second top trending destination for 2026 in Tripadvisor’s rankings. That has pulled through a serious hotel pipeline: roughly 23 internationally branded projects representing around 2,700 keys, with Accor the most active (about seven projects), followed by Hilton and IHG with three each, Hyatt and Wyndham with two, and Marriott with one.

The headline schemes are large. In Tbilisi, the Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino development is planned as a two-tower, roughly 1,200-room campus combining a 500-room Planet Hollywood and a 600-room Radisson Blu, alongside a casino of around 50,000 sq ft, a 4,000-seat entertainment venue and over 70,000 sq ft of retail. On the coast, Batumi has a 576-key Radisson beachfront resort at Gonio and a Mercure near the botanical gardens, plus the 84-hectare Ambassadori Island reclamation project, of which around 26 hectares were handed over by the end of 2025.

The second driver is transit. Georgia sits on the Middle Corridor, the route running from China across the Caspian to Alat in Azerbaijan, onto the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, and out through the Georgian Black Sea ports. Cargo transit through Georgia rose about 21% year on year in the first four months of 2026, and roughly 46% over four years. That has generated its own demand — staff canteens, logistics-park catering, roadside and rail-hub foodservice — on top of the hotels.

What you actually pay to import

Customs duty: three bands, and most goods sit in the lowest

Georgian import duty falls into three bands: 0%, 5% and 12%. Nearly 90% of goods enter at zero. Broadly, the 12% band captures agricultural products and building materials, and the 5% band picks up certain other categories; the great majority of manufactured goods pay nothing.

Most commercial kitchen equipment — refrigeration under HS 8418, cooking and heating equipment under 8419, dishwashers under 8422, food preparation machinery under 8438, and stainless steel tableware and fabricated items under 7323 — sits at or near the zero band. But do not take that as a promise. Published summaries of the Georgian tariff differ on which categories of “equipment and means of production” attract 5%, and classification is decided line by line. Get your broker to confirm the rate against the Revenue Service tariff database for each HS code on your packing list before you build the number into a budget.

The China–Georgia FTA: real, but it probably will not save you money

Georgia was the first country in the region to sign a free trade agreement with China — signed in Beijing on 13 May 2017 and in force since 2018. It is genuinely significant for Georgian exporters, freeing roughly 94% of Georgian goods going the other way from customs taxes.

For a buyer importing Chinese kitchen equipment into Georgia, though, the honest assessment is that the FTA changes little, because Georgia’s MFN rate on this equipment is already zero or near it. You cannot get a better rate than nothing.

Where it still matters is documentation. If a Certificate of Origin is not presented to customs at the time of import, the customs authority may apply the non-preferential duty or require a guarantee equivalent to the full duty amount. So on any line where a non-zero rate could apply, a missing or defective certificate turns a paper problem into a cash problem at the port. We issue the certificate of origin with the shipping documents as standard, and we check the description on it against the invoice and packing list before the container is sealed — because customs read those three documents against each other, and a mismatch in wording is the most common reason a straightforward clearance stops.

VAT: 18%, and this is the number that matters

Georgian VAT on imported goods is 18%, charged on the customs value plus any duty and excise. On a USD 300,000 kitchen package with zero duty, that is USD 54,000 payable at import.

For a VAT-registered hotel operating company this is recoverable, but it is still cash out at the port, and it is routinely missing from FF&E budgets prepared abroad. Model it as a cash-flow line with a recovery lag, not as a cost you can ignore. If the importing entity is not VAT-registered — a common situation where a project company is set up purely to build — that 18% is a real and permanent cost. Settle which entity imports before you issue the purchase order, not after.

Clearance costs and time

Georgia’s clearance process is fast by regional standards and largely electronic, handled through the Revenue Service. Budget modestly for broker fees, terminal handling and any inspection charge. Realistically, allow a week from vessel arrival to equipment on site for a clean shipment, and build in a fortnight of float — not because Georgian customs are slow, but because inland transport, crane availability and site readiness rarely align on the first attempt.

The unusual part: certification is largely voluntary

This is where Georgia differs from every other market we write these guides for, and it deserves careful reading.

Georgia operates a system of voluntary standards and certification. An importer may choose to conform products to Georgian standards, or to the standards of any EU or OECD member country. Where foreign standards are chosen, they are registered by the importer with the National Agency for Standardization, Technical Regulations and Metrology. Mandatory certification is reserved for categories tied to the safety of life, health and the environment — food products themselves, veterinary and medical products, agricultural goods.

Commercial kitchen equipment generally is not in a mandatory certification scheme. There is no Georgian equivalent of a SASO certificate of conformity or an EAC declaration that you must obtain before shipping.

Separately, under the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the EU, Georgia is progressively approximating its technical regulations to EU law. A first group of EU directives has been adopted, with the remainder scheduled for gradual approximation over an eight-year programme with transitional periods. The practical direction of travel is towards EU-style requirements, but the timetable is staged and category-specific — so check the current position for your product type rather than assuming EU rules already bite.

Food safety is the exception that does have teeth. The National Food Agency, under the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture, is the competent authority for food safety, veterinary control and plant quarantine, and issues import and transit permits where those controls apply. That governs the food, not the machinery — but it governs the operator who will use your machinery, and hotel food-safety inspections increasingly ask about equipment surfaces, temperature control and cleanability.

What this means in practice for a buyer

No mandatory border gate is a commercial advantage — no certification fees, no eight-week conformity window, no shipment held pending a certificate. It is also a risk transfer. Nobody in the Georgian import chain is going to fail your equipment for you.

Three things follow, and they are the whole argument of this guide:

1. Your specification is the gate. Write it properly. Name materials, gauges, ratings, and the tests you expect. Our guide to writing an equipment specification and BOQ sets out the schedule structure and the “or equal” wording that stops a bidder substituting a thinner product.
2. Buy the inspection you are no longer getting free. Third-party pre-shipment inspection costs a fraction of a percent of order value and is the only realistic substitute for a certification regime. Our pre-shipment inspection guide covers AQL sampling and the checks that actually catch problems.
3. Ask for certification anyway. Georgia may not require CE or IEC/CB reports, but you should — as evidence, not as a permit. What CE, ETL, NSF and CB marks each mean, and which are worth insisting on, is set out in our certifications guide. We supply CE and IEC/CB test reports, declarations of conformity, wiring diagrams and component schedules with the shipment as standard, whether or not the destination demands them.

Power and gas: build to the declared supply

Georgia runs on 220 V, 50 Hz single phase and 380 V, 50 Hz three phase — the standard regional configuration, and the one most Chinese-built commercial equipment is natively supplied for. That makes Georgia an easier electrical proposition than Latin America or the Gulf.

Two cautions. First, confirm on site whether a neutral is present, especially in older Tbilisi buildings and converted properties, because a 400 V star supply that gives you 230 V line-to-neutral is not the same connection as a three-phase delta feed, and heating elements are built for one or the other. Second, gas supply varies: natural gas is widely available in Tbilisi and along the main network, while mountain resort locations and some Black Sea sites run on LPG. Burner injectors are sized for one gas at one pressure. Tell us which before production, not on commissioning day.

Logistics: the ports are the real constraint

This is the part of a Georgian project most likely to move your programme.

Poti handles roughly 80% of Georgia’s container traffic. It is a shallow-draft port and has been running close to operational capacity. A USD 250 million expansion is deepening it to about 13.5 metres, and a new deep-water terminal is planned to lift annual capacity above one million TEU.

Batumi is the second container option and is likewise shallow.

Anaklia is the deep-water answer — built to 16–17 metres, the only Georgian Black Sea port able to handle Panamax-class vessels. It is expected to become operational around 2029, and in July the government moved to a landlord model, retaining a controlling stake and ownership of the land and core infrastructure while inviting private and international operators to run individual terminals. Useful for your five-year view; irrelevant to a kitchen shipping this year.

The practical consequences for a 2026 shipment:

• Ocean via transhipment is the normal route. Chinese main ports to Poti or Batumi typically means transhipment in the Mediterranean or at a Turkish hub, with feeder capacity into the Black Sea. Allow 35–50 days port to port, and treat the feeder leg as the variable one.
• Middle Corridor rail — China to the Caspian, ferry to Alat, then Baku–Tbilisi–Kars — is faster on paper and increasingly used. It is also subject to Caspian ferry scheduling, which is the least predictable link in the chain. Our Azerbaijan import guide covers that corridor in detail from the Caspian side, and the Kazakhstan guide covers the rail entry at Khorgos.
• Via Turkey overland is viable for smaller or urgent consignments; see our Turkey guide for the customs-union rules that apply if goods are cleared into Turkey first rather than moved in transit.

Because the ports are draft-constrained and feeder-dependent, do not plan a Georgian opening around a single container arriving on a single date. Plan around a window.

Indicative FOB budgets for Georgian projects, 2026

All figures FOB China, equipment only — excluding freight, insurance, VAT, inland transport, installation and site works.

Line items for reference: 10-tray combi oven USD 4,200–8,200; pass-through dishwasher USD 3,500–6,200; undercounter refrigerator USD 1,600–3,000; 6-burner gas range with oven USD 1,400–2,600; walk-in cold room 20 m³ with condensing unit USD 7,500–13,500; custom stainless tabling USD 180–420 per linear metre depending on gauge, undershelf and upstand.

Add roughly 18% for VAT at import, and 8–14% of FOB for freight and inland delivery depending on route and season.

Buying in phases across several properties

A pattern worth considering, and one that suits Georgia specifically because there is no certification window forcing you to commit early: split the order by what changes and what does not.

Stainless fabrication, extraction ductwork, cold room panels and the pipework behind them are dimensional. They are tied to the building, they do not become obsolete, and they should be bought once, complete, at the shell-and-core stage — with drains and power positioned for the largest machine the space could ever hold rather than the one you are buying today. Machines are different. They can arrive per property, per opening date, and be swapped later.

For a group opening a Tbilisi property this year and a Batumi property next, that means one fabrication order covering both sites, drawn and built together so the two kitchens are dimensionally identical and spare parts are common, then two separate equipment shipments timed to each opening. Operators get an identical working environment in both properties, and the second kitchen’s cash outlay moves into the next financial year.

Preguntas frecuentes

What is the import duty on commercial kitchen equipment in Georgia?

Georgia applies three duty bands — 0%, 5% and 12% — and nearly 90% of goods enter at zero. Most commercial kitchen equipment sits at or near the zero band, but published summaries differ on which equipment categories may attract 5%, so confirm each HS code against the Revenue Service tariff with your broker before budgeting.

Does the China–Georgia free trade agreement reduce my import cost?

Usually not, because Georgia’s normal rate on this equipment is already zero or close to it and there is nothing below zero to reach. The agreement, in force since 2018, matters mainly for Georgian exports to China. What still matters to importers is the certificate of origin itself: if it is not presented at import, customs may apply non-preferential duty or require a guarantee for the full amount.

Do I need certification to import kitchen equipment into Georgia?

Generally no. Georgia operates a largely voluntary standards system in which the importer may conform to Georgian standards or to those of any EU or OECD country, with foreign standards registered with the national standards agency. Mandatory certification is reserved for categories tied to life, health and environmental safety. You should still require CE or IEC/CB documentation from your supplier as evidence of build quality, because no border check will do that for you.

How much VAT will I pay on a kitchen equipment shipment to Georgia?

18%, calculated on the customs value plus any duty and excise. On a USD 300,000 package with zero duty that is USD 54,000 payable at import. It is recoverable by a VAT-registered entity but is a real cash-flow item, and a permanent cost if the importing entity is not VAT-registered.

Which Georgian port should I ship to, and how long does it take?

Poti handles around 80% of container traffic and is the default; Batumi is the alternative. Both are shallow-draft and near capacity, though Poti is being deepened to about 13.5 metres under a USD 250 million expansion. Anaklia, the deep-water port able to take Panamax vessels, is expected operational around 2029. Allow 35–50 days port to port from China by ocean with transhipment, and plan around an arrival window rather than a fixed date.

Working with a factory rather than a trader

In a market with no mandatory conformity gate, who you buy from carries more weight than usual, because the supplier’s own quality system is the only system in the chain. If you are comparing Chinese sources for a Georgian project, our guide to the principales fabricantes de equipos de cocina comercial en China is a reasonable place to start narrowing the field.

Our export team is ready to support your project — WhatsApp +86 158 1364 3427. Send your equipment list or drawings and tell us the port, the importing entity’s VAT status and the opening date, and we will come back with an FOB quotation, HS classification per line for your broker, and a shipping plan built around the Black Sea feeder schedule rather than around an optimistic single date.

This article is commercial guidance based on published sources as at August 2026, not legal, tax or customs advice. Tariff classifications, VAT treatment, standards requirements and port infrastructure timelines change; confirm current requirements with the Revenue Service of Georgia, the National Agency for Standardization, Technical Regulations and Metrology, and your licensed customs broker before committing to a purchase.