7UP — Wholesale Supply

One brand name, two trademark owners

The 7UP trademark has two owners. Across most of the world it belongs to PepsiCo; inside the United States it sits with Keurig Dr Pepper. One logo, two entirely separate supply chains, and a buyer who does not know which one a quotation refers to is not comparing like with like. Iguazu Trading exports EU-produced 7UP from Madrid as an independent trader in genuine brand-owner stock, and the whole of this page is about getting the specification right before anything is reserved.

The practical consequences of that split show up long before the container is loaded. Production for European markets runs on metric fill sizes and European multipack construction; production for the United States runs on the twelve-ounce can and its own pack architecture. Formulation follows the rules of the market a run was made for, so sweetener systems and the declared ingredient list are not guaranteed to match between them. Label sets are built for the destination the stock was produced for, in the language and format that market requires.

None of that makes either version wrong. It makes them two line items that happen to share a logo. If a customer specification, a competitor listing or a photograph shows a twelve-ounce can, it is describing product from the American side of the split, and quoting European stock against it will produce a mismatch at the exact point where it is most expensive to discover.

Why a brand name is not a specification

Most of the orders that go wrong on this line go wrong for a dull reason: the buyer sent a name and the supplier quoted a name. A SKU is pinned down by five things, and an enquiry that carries all five can be answered properly in a day.

• Fill size, with the unit of measure written out
• Pack construction: loose cans, tray, sleeve, shrink multipack, or bottles in a case
• The variant, including whether it is the sugar-free line
• The label language set the destination requires
• The barcode from the pack your customer already sells, if there is one

What a barcode does and does not tell you

Buyers sometimes read the first digits of an EAN as proof of where a can was filled. It is not that. A GS1 prefix identifies the member organisation that issued the number range to the brand owner, which is a fact about company registration rather than about a filling line. It is genuinely useful for matching a SKU to the one already selling in your market, and useless as evidence of origin. Origin is evidenced by the Certificate of Origin on the consignment, and preferential origin by a EUR.1 where the destination has an agreement with the EU and the goods qualify under it. Our position on documentation and provenance is set out in full under authenticity and compliance.

Two customers, two ordering patterns

Grocery and convenience buy 7UP as a permanent facing, replenished to a steady rhythm and pushed in multipack when there is a promotion behind it. Hospitality buys the same liquid as a working ingredient, poured behind bars and at events, ordered against occupancy rather than against a shelf plan. The volumes rarely peak together, which is what makes the line useful to a distributor: retail gives you a predictable base and hospitality gives you upside without a second SKU to service it.

It also means the split has to be decided before the container is built, not after it arrives. Serving both channels out of one warehouse means carrying at least two formats on the same load, in a ratio that reflects the accounts you actually hold rather than the ones you would like to. Tell us at enquiry which channels you supply and roughly how the volume divides, and we will look for the formats that match rather than the formats that happen to be deepest in allocation.

Cans or PET

Cans carry the multipack and impulse volume and suit table and counter service, where each unit is opened and finished. PET carries the take-home occasion and suits venues pouring by volume, where a resealable large format is worth more than a tidy single serve. The economics differ in a way that matters to freight as well as to margin: small formats carry more packaging and more headspace per litre sold, large formats less. Neither is better; they are answers to different questions, and the right ratio is the one that matches your accounts.

Where a buyer is building a full carbonate fixture rather than a single listing, 7UP normally travels with a cola and an orange. A PepsiCo-weighted order usually pairs it with Pepsi for the volume tier and Mirinda for the fruit tier, which keeps one supplier, one booking and one document set across the whole fixture instead of three.

Order tiers, gateways and paperwork

Supply runs from single cases through pallets to full container loads, and mixed-brand and mixed-category pallets are routine. Loading is from our Madrid warehouse, which is inland: Valencia is roughly 355 km away and Barcelona roughly 620 km, both about a day on the road, with Algeciras available as a transhipment alternative and Coslada as the rail option. On EXW the handover is at our premises rather than at a port, which is the most common misunderstanding in a first quotation and worth confirming in writing.

Every consignment leaves with a commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration and transport document, plus a Certificate of Origin or a EUR.1 as the destination requires. Best-before dating and batch numbers are confirmed against the allocation actually reserved for you. Case counts, pallet configuration and pallets per container are stated on the pro-forma for the same reason: they move with format and allocation, and a number published in advance is a number that will eventually be wrong.