Knorr Bouillon & Seasonings — Wholesale Supply

Knorr is a shelf, not a product

Nothing else we sell has this much surface area. Under one trademark sit bouillon cubes in four or five stock flavours, gel and paste stock pots, powdered bases, packet soups, gravy granules, roux and sauce mixes, dry seasoning blends and a whole foodservice line built for kitchens cooking at volume. Several hundred distinct articles are plausibly in scope for a European buyer. So an enquiry that says "Knorr, one container, best price" is not a small ask badly phrased; it is a large ask with the hard part left out, and the hard part is the article list.

This page is written to help you produce that list quickly. Everything here sits inside our sauces, condiments and seasonings range, and dry goods of this kind are among the easiest lines in the catalogue to hold, move and consolidate — once someone has decided what is actually being bought.

Buy at article level

The practical unit of trade here is the article, identified by its retail barcode, its pack size, its count per case and the market its packaging was printed for. Two cubes that share a flavour name, a colour and a brand can be different articles with different case configurations and different pack languages, and a container built from a brand-level shopping list will contain some of both.

Send us whatever level of detail you have — a barcode list, photographs of the packs currently on your shelf, or simply a description of the fixture — and we will come back with an article list you can approve or amend. That list, priced line by line, is what becomes the pro-forma. It takes one exchange more than a brand-level enquiry and removes the argument that otherwise happens at discharge.

The families inside the range

Family	Typical formats	Who orders it
Bouillon and stock cubes	Retail multipacks, catering cartons	Grocery, cash and carry, diaspora retail
Stock pots and powdered stocks	Tubs, jars, bulk tins	Hotels, contract catering, central kitchens
Packet soups	Single and multi-serve sachets	Grocery, with its own seasonality
Gravies, roux and sauce mixes	Sachets, canisters	The dry-mix shelf beside the cube
Seasoning blends	Shakers, sachets, refills	Grocery and foodservice both

The recipe is local and the wrapper is the product

This is the point on which Knorr enquiries most often come apart. The brand is formulated market by market, and the differences are not marketing. A bouillon cube built for daily use in West African cooking is a different formulation from a European stock cube, built around a different aromatic profile and presented in packaging a shopper there recognises instantly. Both are authentic. Neither substitutes for the other on a shelf where the purchase is made from two metres away by wrapper alone.

What we supply is EU-produced Knorr: European recipes, European pack languages, European ingredient and allergen declarations. That suits a buyer supplying diaspora retail in or from Europe, a hotel or a contract kitchen, a market where the European cube is the accepted reference, or a modern-trade fixture built on imported goods. It is the wrong stock for a buyer whose shopper expects a locally formulated cube, and no commercial term makes that work. Put the destination market at the top of your first message and the rest of the exchange takes a day rather than a fortnight.

Dry goods are easy to keep and easy to spoil

Cubes, powders and sachets hold their condition in ambient storage better than almost anything else we handle, which is why importers stage them rather than clearing everything at once, and why they suit a duty-suspended position where that is worth arranging. The two things that damage them are both avoidable. The first is moisture: a dry-goods pallet does not travel next to anything liquid, does not sit under a sweating roof line, and does not stand on a wet quay. The second is crush: the cartons are light and thin-walled, so they belong high in the build rather than under something dense, and the tier alignment matters more than the wrapping.

That second point has a commercial edge to it. Because these cases weigh very little for the volume they occupy, they are the natural thing to load into the space a heavy pallet leaves behind, and a mixed pallet drawn across cubes, soups and dry mixes is a cheap way to test an assortment before committing depth to any one article.

Pack language is a specification, not a preference

Francophone West Africa expects French on the pack. GCC retail expects Arabic-language labelling and the approved halal mark, and Saudi entry expects Arabic ingredient declarations. Certification is confirmed article by article, in writing, for the batch actually being offered. Where an additional panel is applied, it is applied in Madrid to artwork you have approved, before the pallet leaves.

The customs file is the standard EU export set: commercial invoice, packing list to case level, export declaration, transport document, Certificate of Origin, and a EUR.1 movement certificate where a preferential agreement applies at your border. Ingredient and allergen declarations follow the EU food information rules in the languages of the producing market. If any of those instruments are new to you, the export terminology glossary defines them without assuming you have shipped before.

Where bouillon actually moves

Bouillon is one of the deepest habitual categories in the world, bought in small units at high frequency, and the enquiries reflect that. West and East African importers take volume on cubes and are the most sensitive of all our buyers to the formulation question above. Gulf demand splits between retail cubes for diaspora households and foodservice packs for hotels and contract caterers. European buyers take the full dry-mix shelf rather than the cube alone. South and South-East Asian volumes come through both retail and foodservice. The category also holds up when a market tightens, because home cooking rises as eating out contracts, and buyers who have traded through a currency squeeze tend to know that already.

Buyers assembling a complete condiment aisle rather than a seasoning bay usually price the Hellmann's range at the same time; bouillon and mayonnaise are ordered by the same person for the same fixture and consolidate onto one document set without complication.