Heinz — Wholesale Supply

Why "Heinz ketchup, one forty-foot" cannot be quoted

That sentence arrives in our inbox most weeks, and the polite answer is longer than the question. The keystone label sits on table sauces, canned beans, vinegars, salad cream, single-portion sachets and pump-fed dispensing packs, made at several European plants for several different retail markets. Those things do not weigh the same, they do not stack the same, and they do not sell to the same counter. Settle the pack and the destination first and the rest of a quotation more or less writes itself. Leave them open and any figure we send you is a guess in a suit. The brand sits inside our sauces and condiments range, and this page is about the four or five things that actually decide a Heinz booking.

One trademark, several producing markets

Heinz is formulated and printed for the market each plant supplies. Recipe, declared ingredients, nutrition panel, the graphics a shopper scans for at a metre and the languages on the back are all set by that market rather than by the trademark. The British specification and the continental European one are two separate listings in commercial terms, and a shopper who has bought one for twenty years spots the substitution before the bottle is off the shelf.

What we hold is EU-produced stock carrying the EU ingredient, allergen and nutrition declaration in the languages of the plant that made it. If your fixture was built on the British pack, put that in the first message. It narrows what can be offered against your volume, and it is a great deal cheaper to discover at enquiry than at discharge. Iguazu Trading buys inside the European trade as an independent distributor; we hold no appointment from the brand owner and describe ourselves as nothing more than what we are. The goods are genuine and they travel in the manufacturer's own sealed cases, never re-boxed, never relabelled by us.

Glass is a mechanical problem before it is a food problem

Almost every claim we have ever seen on a sauce consignment is mechanical. The product is fine; the packaging failed. Cartons of glass lose their stack strength quickly once there is weight above them, and the failure is rarely dramatic. It is a crushed lower tier that nobody notices until the pallet is broken down, a stack that has walked two hundred millimetres inside a moving box, a base row that stood in water on a wet quay for an hour and lost its corner strength.

In a mixed load that becomes a stow instruction rather than a hope. Glass goes on the floor, not on top of another line and never under a dense one. Pallets are stretch-wrapped to the base, corner-boarded, and voids are filled so nothing has room to build momentum. Containers are checked for a sound floor and a dry roof before anything is picked. None of that is exotic and all of it is the difference between a load that arrives saleable and a load that arrives as correspondence.

The second thing glass does is fill your payload while the box still looks half empty. A pallet of filled jars is heavy for the floor space it takes, so a glass-led container reaches its weight limit with cube to spare, and the useful planning question becomes what light cargo rides in the room that is left. We build the load around that rather than around the order the brands were listed in. The mechanics of that calculation are set out in our guide to pallets and container loading.

When PET is the honest recommendation

On a long lane into heat, through transhipment, with an inland leg at each end and more handling than anyone would choose, PET usually wins the argument. It does not break, it is cheaper per unit sold to move, and it removes breakage from the conversation entirely. Glass earns its freight where the listing is a premium one and the presentation is part of what the retailer is buying. We will quote both against the same volume so you can see the difference rather than take a view on it.

Sachets and dispenser pouches are a different question again. They are specified for portion control and throughput in quick-service, hotel and institutional kitchens, not for unit economics, and they are usually bought by a different customer inside the same importer. Tell us which counters you supply and we will propose the format rather than ask you to.

Beans are their own business

Baked beans are not an accessory to the ketchup order. They carry a British breakfast convention into expatriate and diaspora retail across the Gulf, parts of Africa and parts of Asia, and the buyers who take them order beans on their own rhythm, in their own quantity, sometimes without a bottle of ketchup on the same line of the pro-forma. If beans are the reason you are writing to us, say so, because the allocation question and the pack question are different from the ones above.

Buyers building a whole table-sauce fixture rather than a single line usually put Hellmann's mayonnaise on the same booking, since ketchup and mayonnaise reorder together and consolidate onto one set of documents without argument.

Allergen declarations, over-labelling and the customs file

Ambient food is where destination compliance is settled before dispatch or not at all. EU packs carry the ingredient and allergen declaration required at production, with allergens emphasised in the ingredient list, and food-contact materials for the container and closure sit under the EU rules that apply to the plant. What a destination adds on top of that varies: Gulf retail expects Arabic-language labelling and the approved halal mark, Saudi entry expects Arabic ingredient declarations, and several African markets ask for a local-language panel. Where an additional panel has to be applied it happens before the pallet leaves Madrid, against artwork you have approved, and whether a particular article can travel with the halal certification your market insists on is answered in writing for the allocation on offer, never inferred from the trademark.

Each consignment travels with a commercial invoice, a packing list itemised to case level, the export declaration, the transport document and a Certificate of Origin, with a EUR.1 movement certificate where a preferential agreement applies to your entry. Batch and best-before detail is recorded on the packing list so your rotation planning starts from the goods rather than from the first delivery note, and the minimum remaining life at arrival is written into the pro-forma before anything is picked.