Lay's Crisps & Potato Chips — Wholesale Supply

Half a container of air

Ask any freight desk which ambient category has the worst cost per unit shipped and bagged crisps will be the answer. Not because the rate is high, but because the buyer paid for a container and used about half of what it could legally carry. A crisp load cubes out before it weighs out — it reaches its volumetric limit long before it approaches its payload limit — and everything else about buying this line at export volume follows from that one fact. Lay's sits inside the snacks range we export, and this page is written around the arithmetic rather than around the flavour list.

Crisps or chips: settle the vocabulary first

Two vocabularies describe one article and both turn up on purchase orders, so it is worth two lines. British, Irish and much continental usage calls the bagged product a crisp and keeps chip for a hot fried potato. American usage, and the Gulf trade supplied out of it, calls the identical bag a potato chip. Neither is wrong and both appear here deliberately. Add the fact that the brand does not wear the same name in every territory — the British equivalent range sells as Walkers — and a buyer comparing two shelves is not always comparing what they assume. The fix is to specify the cut and the cook alongside the noun: standard slice, ridged, kettle, thick cut. Those cross a language boundary intact.

Why the container fills before it fills up

The fill gas that protects the chips in the bag is the same thing that wastes your freight. A case of crisps is mostly air by volume and almost nothing by weight, so the stack reaches the roof of the box while the payload gauge is still nowhere near its limit. You pay ocean freight on the box, not on the weight you failed to use, and nobody issues a refund for the difference.

The instinctive response — order more cases, pack them tighter — is the wrong one, because the cases are already at the volumetric ceiling and compressing a bagged snack is how you turn a shipment into a claim. The correct response is to change what else is in the container.

Building a load that uses both limits

The workable structure is a dense base and a light top, and it solves two problems at once: the payload gets used, and the fragile cargo stops carrying weight it cannot take.

• Beverages, jarred goods and canned lines go low in the stow, where their mass belongs.
• Denser ambient grocery fills the middle tiers.
• Bagged snacks ride above them, carrying nothing.
• Layers are built square, corner-boarded and wrapped to the base, with no carton overhang.
• What sits in each layer is recorded on the packing list, so nobody at the far end has to open a carton to find out.

Mixed-brand and mixed-category pallets are normal here rather than a favour, and a load built that way is priced, papered and moved as a single consignment on a single term. That is what actually shifts the freight cost per unit for a mid-size importer: not a better rate, a fuller box. Within the snack tier the textures complement rather than compete, so most fixtures carry the potato line beside a tortilla one and buyers frequently price the Doritos listing on the same enquiry.

Flavours the local market cannot supply

Very few buyers come to us because the brand is absent from their market. They come because the version already on their shelves is the locally made one, built for local palates, and the European seasonings never reach them. The distance between what a European plant runs and what an importer can buy at home is the thing a European exporter is actually selling; the base listing is available more or less everywhere.

So describe the appetite rather than quoting a code at us. Which flavour territory needs covering, what price position it has to hold, which counter it is destined for — with those three we can answer with what the European plants are running and what has genuinely been allocated to us in that window. If a thing is not there you get told it is not there. Where it helps we will suggest something close in profile, matched on how it tastes rather than on what it is called, since names in this category do not map across borders. No substitution happens without your written agreement.

Format decides channel more reliably than flavour

The small bag is a till-side article: checkouts, petrol stations, kiosks, vending machines, food-to-go. Multipacks are a household purchase and live in grocery and cash and carry. The large bag is built for modern trade, gondola ends and promotional weeks. Catering cases go to kitchens, canteens and vending fillers who want volume through the door and never put a bag on display.

Skew a container entirely to large bags and the till-side margin never gets earned; skew it to small ones and the supermarket basket never grows. Tell us where your volume actually sells and a ratio comes back with the offer. Cartons per pallet, cases per carton and gross weights follow the consignment in front of us rather than a fixed table, and the life left on the date code is set against the floor you give us rather than promised in advance.

Which gateway, and on what terms

We load in Madrid, which is inland — EXW Madrid means our warehouse, not a port, and a buyer on those terms takes the road leg from there. Valencia sits roughly 355 km away and Barcelona roughly 620 km, both about a day's haul, and the choice between them is usually decided by your onward service rather than by the distance; the comparison between the two gateways sets out what actually separates them. Algeciras is available for transhipment and Coslada is the rail option. We also quote FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP; DDP is not offered as standard, and we export worldwide.

Consignments travel with a commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration and transport document, plus a Certificate of Origin and an EUR.1 movement certificate where a preferential agreement applies to your destination. Artwork, ingredient and allergen text and the date code are all the producer's own, inside the producer's own sealed cases; we do not re-box and we do not relabel. Iguazu Trading, a trading name of Iguazu Fragancias SL, is an independent distributor of genuine brand-owner stock and holds no appointment from any brand named on this site. When the specification is settled, send the enquiry through and it is answered within one business day on listed brands.