Evian — Wholesale Supply

What the description legally requires

In the European Union, natural mineral water is a controlled description with conditions attached, not a phrase a marketing department chose. Anyone importing evian is therefore handling a regulated category, and the two things that most often go wrong on this line, a customs description that does not match the goods and a container that is planned around floor space, both follow from missing that. Iguazu Trading exports EU-produced evian from Madrid as an independent distributor of genuine brand-owner stock.

The obligations behind the phrase are specific. Bottling happens at the spring itself rather than at a plant fed by tanker. The mineral profile has to hold steady and be typical of where the water came from, and both the name of the source and its analysis are declared on the pack. A single spring may carry only one trade description, which is why one source never appears on shelf under two competing brand names. Beside it sit spring water and treated drinking water as separate regulated descriptions; a shopper treats all three as the same purchase, and a customs entry does not.

The importer's takeaway is practical. Describe the goods on the commercial invoice and the customs declaration as what they actually are. A generic drinking-water line against a product whose label declares a mineral source is the kind of small mismatch that invites a question at the border and turns a routine entry into a delay.

Labelling at destination

Plenty of destinations insist that the mandatory particulars be readable in a nominated language. Where a translation may be added by sticker, expect the authority to review that sticker alongside the printed label rather than wave it through on sight. And on this category the declared source is doing two jobs at once: it satisfies a labelling requirement, and it is in substance the same statement your Certificate of Origin repeats. That is a large part of why we move EU-produced stock in the manufacturer's own packaging and nothing else, and why we neither re-box nor relabel.

Tell us the destination and the label rule you work to at enquiry. We will confirm what the current allocation supports before a pro-forma is raised, rather than after.

Payload binds before floor space does

Almost everything else we ship fills a box long before it troubles the payload ceiling. Bottled water inverts that, and the inversion propagates through the entire plan. The clearest symptom is that a forty-foot box is not automatically the better buy: on cargo this dense it will often take barely more product than a twenty, because the binding constraint is mass, and the extra floor you paid for has to stay empty.

A chain of consequences hangs off that one constraint. Stack height gets capped by kilos rather than by the door opening. Double-stacking is frequently unavailable. Limits on axle and gross vehicle weight apply on the road at both ends and can bite harder than anything the vessel imposes. The mass of the packed box also has to be verified and declared ahead of loading, so the number needs to be right when the booking is made, not corrected at the terminal gate. Our guide to pallets and container loading works through the arithmetic.

Which gateway for a dense load

On heavy cargo the inland road leg is a real cost per tonne rather than a rounding item, which makes gateway choice worth a moment's thought. Our warehouse is in Madrid, inland. Valencia sits at roughly 355 km, Barcelona at roughly 620 km, both about a day's haul, with Algeciras available as a transhipment alternative and Coslada as the rail option. For water the nearer gateway usually wins unless the sailing schedule to your destination argues otherwise, which it sometimes does. We compare the two routes properly in Valencia against Barcelona, and our logistics page covers how the inland leg is booked.

The size ladder is a freight decision as much as a merchandising one

Each step down the ladder buys more packaging and more empty space for every litre sold, so a pallet of the smallest PET delivers less saleable product per tonne of payload than a pallet of the largest. Move the other way and the freight arithmetic improves while unit margin thins, and the customer changes from a hospitality one to a bulk grocery one. Glass adds weight again for every litre delivered and wants its own position in the stack, normally low.

No size wins in the abstract. The useful thing is to know which of those effects you are paying for. Tell us how the volume divides between everyday retail and hospitality accounts, and the formats get quoted against that division rather than against whichever formats happen to load most conveniently. Buyers running a two-tier premium water listing usually price FIJI Water at the same time and set the two against different occasions rather than against each other on cost per litre.

What goes in writing

Pallet build, pallets to a box, kilos on each pallet and the payload those three produce are calculated for the formats actually on your order and written into the pro-forma. None of the four appears as a standing figure anywhere on this site: each shifts with the format, the pallet base and the packaging in front of us, and on dense cargo a weight that proves wrong does not round off, it stops a booking. Every consignment carries a commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration and transport document, with a Certificate of Origin, or a EUR.1 movement certificate where the destination holds a preferential agreement with the EU and the goods qualify under it.