Lipton Ice Tea — Wholesale Supply

The second order is where the listing is won

Almost every Lipton Ice Tea enquiry we receive is written as though it were a one-off purchase. Very few of them turn out to be one. This is a listed line in most fixtures it enters, which means the interesting questions are about replenishment, dating and rotation rather than about a single container, and this page is written around those. Iguazu Trading exports EU-produced stock from Madrid as an independent distributor of genuine brand-owner product.

A first container is a hypothesis about a flavour and format split. The sell-through report is the answer, and the useful discipline is to put the review date in the diary before the first order ships rather than after it lands. Decide in advance what you will measure, which variants you would cut, which you would deepen, and by what date the follow-on stock has to be on shelf to avoid a gap.

The exact split goes onto the pro-forma for a reason: it gives the second build something to be measured against other than memory. On repeat supply we schedule call-offs so the oldest production leaves first and deliveries track consumption, instead of one large arrival ageing quietly in a warehouse. None of that is generosity. It is the difference between a listing that survives its first year and one that gets reviewed out of the range.

Remaining shelf life is a contract term, not a footnote

Retail listing agreements commonly carry a minimum remaining-life clause, and it is enforced at the depot rather than negotiated at the desk. A batch that is entirely saleable through a cash-and-carry can be turned away by a supermarket receiving bay on a date code alone. The difference between those two outcomes is a number that should have been in the enquiry.

Put the threshold in the enquiry, then. Dating and batch identification are checked against the particular allocation before any money moves, and both are written onto the pro-forma and the packing list. You will not find a headline shelf-life number on this page: a general figure would be misleading, since the one that governs your listing is printed on the batch you are actually offered. It is also worth remembering that a ready-to-drink tea is not a carbonate, and the buyers who come unstuck are usually the ones who assumed it behaved like one.

Format follows the channel

Every rung on the pack ladder answers a channel rather than a palate. Cans belong to vending and impulse: they face up neatly in a chiller door and they are what a multipack promotion is built on. The mid-size bottle is what somebody buys while moving, which is why it dominates forecourt and convenience. The take-home bottle competes on litre price and often earns its space in the ambient aisle rather than the cold one. Glass, where a market version offers it, exists for the operator who has to put something presentable in front of a guest.

Weight the ladder to the accounts you hold. A cash-and-carry and convenience book runs on cans and mid-size bottles, with take-home as a secondary line. A supermarket book runs the other way round, the take-home bottle doing the work and cans appearing mainly when there is a promotion behind them. Same brand, two very different builds, and an error here costs more than an error in the flavour split.

Market version, and why the packs differ

The ready-to-drink business reaches its territories through bottling and licensing arrangements rather than out of one production source, and that is the whole reason versions differ. Fill sizes vary. So do variant names, the languages on the label and any deposit-return marking printed onto the pack. A specification copied from one market's shelf will not accurately describe another's.

Name the destination and the language set when you enquire. The version we are actually offering, against whatever has been allocated that week, is stated on the pro-forma in writing. If a broker or a retail customer has a fixed requirement on the ingredient declaration or on language, raise it before the booking and you will get a yes or a no against current stock rather than a hopeful maybe. Where a destination allows translation by sticker, expect that sticker to be reviewed alongside the printed label rather than treated as a finishing touch.

Flavours, sugar lines and mixed-variant pallets

Three variants carry the volume almost everywhere: lemon, peach and the green tea. Around them sit mango and whatever local extensions a market's taste supports, plus the reduced-sugar and no-added-sugar lines. Variety is what sells the fixture, so a typical build stacks single-variant layers into a mixed pallet rather than dedicating a whole pallet to one flavour, and each mixed pallet is broken out line by line on the packing list so nothing has to be opened to be identified.

Keep the sugar decision separate from the flavour decision, because they are separate. A reduced-sugar line is its own SKU with its own barcode and its own rate of sale, and in destinations that band beverage tax by sugar content it also lands at a different cost. Send the ratio you want costed and it is priced as sent.

Where it sits in the tea set, and how it ships

This is the anchor of the mainstream tier, and an anchor leaves space above and below it. Arizona Iced Tea takes the loud, high-visibility position that brings a younger shopper to the chiller; Fuze Tea works as a third tier wherever the fixture can carry one. Ranged together, the set covers several price points without the three lines eating each other.

Order sizes start at case level and run to full container loads, with mixed-brand and mixed-category pallets treated as normal and part-loads available while a listing is still unproven. Loading is from Madrid, inland, with Valencia at roughly 355 km and Barcelona at roughly 620 km as the deep-sea gateways. Consignments carry a commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration and transport document, with a Certificate of Origin, or a EUR.1 where the destination holds a preferential agreement with the EU and the goods qualify. Routing, transit and handover are covered under shipping and delivery, and the commercial framework under our terms of sale.