What a consolidator controls

We buy finished goods made by the companies that own the brands, and we consolidate them into mixed 20ft and 40ft containers. We do not manufacture, formulate or laboratory-test them, and the manufacturer's own release testing sits behind the goods without us repeating it or adding to it.

Country of manufacture is declared per SKU on the product page. Questions about formulation, ingredient sourcing or the food-safety scheme a plant holds belong with the manufacturer named on the pack, and we will tell you which company that is so you can put them there.

Every carton of Vietnamese-made stock we ship is bought inside Vietnam either under an appointment we hold from the brand owner, which covers part of the catalogue, or from the distributor that brand owner appointed, which covers the rest. The smaller number of lines made in Korea, Thailand or the Philippines is bought from the licensed Vietnamese importer that brings them in. We do not publish which brands we are appointed for, because naming them is how a supply line gets closed, and we do not describe ourselves as authorised across a catalogue where most of it is bought rather than appointed. Where the appointment on a line you are quoting is ours, we show it to you in writing under a mutual NDA; where it is not, what we confirm in writing is that the line was bought from that brand owner's appointed distributor, on a VAT invoice.

Every purchase is made against a Vietnamese VAT invoice issued by a registered domestic supplier under its own tax code. Stock bought without one is cheaper, and nobody downstream of it can establish where it has been, so we do not quote against it.

The check available to you does not depend on trusting us. Photograph the production code on a sample carton, send it to the brand owner's office in your own market and ask them to confirm the plant and the date it encodes. Do that with any supplier you are qualifying, before the first order rather than after it.

The failures this trade actually produces are specific: detergent and fabric-softener bottles refilled with something else, counterfeit toothpaste cartons, best-before codes ground off or overprinted, and right brand, wrong licensee. Red Bull made in Vietnam, in Thailand and in Austria are different products with different formulations, pack sizes and label panels; sending you the wrong one is not fraud, and it will still fail your customer.

We never remove, obscure or overprint a batch or production code. A pack whose code has been tampered with cannot be traced, matched to a document or recalled. The legal reason weighs as much as the practical one: removal or obscuring of identification and production codes is itself a ground on which a brand owner can lawfully oppose further resale of goods that are otherwise genuine, which is the point decided in Loendersloot v Ballantine and applied since.

Batch and production codes are printed by the manufacturer in the manufacturer's own format, and no one further down the chain can alter them without destroying their value. A consolidator therefore controls what is recorded about them rather than what they say.

Three things are written into the offer as commitments rather than described here as habits. Batch codes and best-before dates are listed per SKU, on the packing list or on a batch schedule annexed to it, rather than summarised for the container. The printed codes are photographed at stuffing, retained, and released with the shipping documents on request. Which batch went into which container, and to which customer, is recorded and kept.

We do not run a recall; the brand owner or your market's authority does that. What the record lets us do is name every container and every customer that received a given batch, and notify them once we are told which batch is affected.

What we will not promise is consecutive batch numbers, or a single production date per SKU, on a mixed container. Stock is drawn from what the distributor holds that week, and across forty lines that promise is rarely achievable; a supplier who makes it is either loading one line or planning to explain later.

We commit to a minimum of 75% of total declared shelf life remaining. Declared shelf life differs sharply by line, from months on snacks and biscuits to years on oral care and home care, so the commitment is expressed as a percentage of the declared life rather than as a fixed number of months.

The measurement point is the date of the bill of lading. Where your market measures remaining life on arrival instead, the point is agreed and named in the offer before the order, because the gap is not academic: 30 to 60 days of sailing to West Africa or the Pacific, plus port dwell, means a twelve-month line that left at 75% arrives below it.

Contractual remaining shelf life and regulatory remaining shelf life are two different tests, and meeting ours does not settle theirs. Several markets enforce a minimum remaining life at the port of entry, most visibly in the Gulf: in Saudi Arabia the authority is the SFDA, and in the United Arab Emirates it is the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment with the local food authorities that clear the consignment, so the rule is applied on arrival by the inspector rather than by us. We do not print percentages for named countries, because published figures conflict and a figure you plan a shipment on should come from the authority or your clearing agent.

We do not move short-dated stock quietly. Where a line is available with less remaining life than the commitment, it is offered as short-dated, with its production and best-before dates named in the offer, and you can decline it without losing the rest of the container.

Branded goods leave the plant in the artwork the brand owner printed for the domestic market. What your market requires on top of that is applied here, to artwork you approve, before the cartons are loaded, rather than at your port where a loaded container has to be stripped and restuffed to reach them.

• The Gulf

  Arabic labelling is mandatory under GSO 9, adopted by Saudi Arabia as SFDA.FD/GSO 9:2022, with production and expiry dates printed before export rather than shelf life expressed as a duration. Halal documentation is the live exposure on gelatine-containing confectionery. Standards in the UAE sit with MoIAT, which absorbed ESMA in 2020, while the consignment itself is cleared by the authorities named under shelf life above, so a label file still naming ESMA has not been reviewed since.

• The European Union

  Food is labelled under Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011: the member state's language, allergen emphasis, a nutrition declaration and a named EU food business operator. Oral care and personal care fall under Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 and need an EU-established Responsible Person holding the product information file, which has to be you or your appointee and cannot be us.

• West and East Africa

  Nigeria regulates food, beverages, cosmetics, chemicals and detergents through NAFDAC, and that registration is held by the importer, not by us. Kenya (PVoC under KEBS) and Ghana (G-CAP under the Ghana Standards Authority) both need a per-consignment certificate issued here before the vessel sails, so both are booked into the loading schedule.

The GTIN is allocated by the brand owner, not by us and not by you. EAN-13 sits on the consumer unit and ITF-14 on the shipping carton, and the ITF-14 is what most retail distribution centres scan at the door, so tell us before loading if your centre needs it presented in a particular way. We never overprint or replace a branded consumer-unit barcode.

Deciding what your market requires is yours; applying it before the goods sail is ours. We label to text and artwork you approve and we do not draft the compliance panel ourselves, because the party carrying the regulatory risk in your market has to be the party that signs it off.

A mixed container is loaded to a plan: dense lines on the floor, crushable cartons above, and the packing list as the record of what went in. A short count or a wrong SKU found in your warehouse is a claim against a shipment that has already sailed; found on the floor here, it is corrected before the doors close.

Condensation forms when the interior of a container reaches dew point on a long tropical voyage. Cartons lose stacking strength as they take up moisture and paper labels lift, so desiccant is the standard control. We specify it against the routing and the season and confirm that specification in writing before loading, rather than claiming every box is fitted as standard.

A dry container on a Gulf or Red Sea routing routinely passes 50°C inside, and coated confectionery blooms well below that. We flag heat-sensitive lines on those lanes before you order them rather than shipping them and arguing about the condition they arrive in.

The container is sealed and the seal number is carried on the packing list and the bill of lading, so you can confirm at your end that the box you open is the box we closed. Where an inspector attends the loading, the inspector's own seal is used and the number is recorded the same way.

A buyer-nominated inspection is never refused, on any order, at any size. Buyers normally nominate SGS, Bureau Veritas, Intertek or Cotecna; your own agent or your own staff on the floor is equally acceptable, and the date is set with the loading slot rather than after it.

A container loading check normally starts with the empty container before stuffing: holes, light leaks, odour, previous-cargo residue, floor and door seals. It then covers production codes and batches against the packing list and invoice, an agreed AQL sample check, supervision of the loading, sealing with the inspector's own seal, and a photographic report issued to you. Pre-shipment inspection of the goods at rest is booked separately.

Inspection is at the buyer's cost. The inspector's fee, the attendance and any re-attendance where a date is missed sit on your account, and the figure is settled in the offer rather than assumed. What is ours is co-operation rather than money: the goods, the documents and the loading floor are open to whoever you send, because an inspection you have paid for and we obstruct is worth nothing to either of us.

The pack leaving Vietnam falls into four groups. What is in the fourth depends on your market and on what is in the container.

• Commercial invoice and transport document

  The commercial invoice for the shipment, and the bill of lading or seaway bill. These are what your bank and your broker work from, and the figures on them match the packing list line by line.

• Packing list

  Itemised per SKU with carton count, batch codes and best-before dates, rather than one summary line for the container. It is the document that makes the rest of this page checkable at your end.

• Certificate of origin

  Issued for the shipment, and certifying Vietnamese manufacture. It cannot be issued for the small number of lines made in Korea, Thailand or the Philippines: those travel under the manufacturer's own origin document from the country of manufacture, with a certificate of non-manipulation issued in Vietnam where your customs ask for one.

• Market-specific documents

  A health certificate for processed food where your market demands one, issued in Vietnam against the manufacturer rather than against us and therefore dependent on the manufacturer releasing it, halal certification where the market or the product requires it, safety data sheets for detergents, an IMDG dangerous goods declaration for aerosols, ISPM 15 marking on wooden pallets, and an insurance certificate under CIF or CIP. Which of these apply is settled at the offer stage rather than at the port.

Form B is the non-preferential certificate for Vietnamese-made goods and it applies to every destination. For most of the markets we serve there is no alternative: Vietnam has no free trade agreement with Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Fiji or Kiribati, and none with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain or Oman, so the form is Form B and it carries no duty benefit. Preferential forms exist where an agreement does, among them Form D into ASEAN, Form RCEP, Form AANZ into Australia and New Zealand, EUR.1 into the EU under EVFTA and the UK under UKVFTA, and the UAE-VN form into the United Arab Emirates under the CEPA that entered into force on 3 February 2026. We name the form for your lane in the offer, and if a quotation implies duty relief travels with the shipment, ask which agreement it is claimed under.

Since 5 May 2025, under Decision 1103/QD-BCT, the Ministry of Industry and Trade is the sole issuing body for certificates of origin in Vietnam. VCCI no longer issues them, so a document list naming VCCI predates the change.

HACCP, ISO 22000, BRCGS and FSSC 22000 are awarded to a named manufacturing site after that site has been audited. A business with no factory cannot hold them for goods it did not make, and cannot inherit them from a supplier.

The honest form is pass-through. The manufacturing site for a given SKU holds a named scheme, with a certificate number, an issuing body and an expiry date, and what we give you is that certificate rather than a claim about it. Ask per SKU, because the site differs per SKU, and where the distributor will not release a certificate we will tell you that plainly instead of describing the scheme back to you.

We hold no certification in our own name today. Two would genuinely apply to a business that buys and sells without manufacturing: ISO 9001, and BRCGS Agents & Brokers, which exists precisely for companies that trade food without making it. We hold neither.

Do not qualify a supplier on the strength of a logo. Ask for the certificate, then check it against the issuing body's own register rather than against a website, ours included.

We sell goods. We do not sell distribution rights, territorial exclusivity or any permission from a brand owner, because those are not ours to sell. If a brand owner has appointed someone in your market, that appointment stands whatever we ship you.

This matters most in the EEA and the United Kingdom, which apply regional rather than international exhaustion of trade mark rights. Goods first placed on the market in Vietnam are not exhausted in the EEA, so the proprietor can lawfully block their import; Silhouette and Zino Davidoff are the cases usually cited, and silence from the proprietor is not implied consent. A buyer shipping into those markets should take its own advice before ordering.

You are the importer of record. Registration, market authorisation, the party named on the label and the consequences of selling into a territory someone else has been appointed to are yours to establish before you order. The trade desk will tell you what we know about a brand's arrangements in your market, which is often nothing, and we will say so rather than guess.

Under both FOB and CIF, risk passes when the goods are on board at the port of shipment. Under CIF we pay the freight; we do not carry the risk to your port. That distinction decides who claims from whom, and it is better settled before the first container than during the first problem.

Transit damage is normally a claim on your cargo insurance, so read what you actually hold. Incoterms 2020 requires the seller to insure at 110% of the contract value under both CIF and CIP, but only to Institute Cargo Clauses (C) under CIF, which responds to a named list of perils and not to theft, pilferage or damage from improper stowage; CIP requires Clauses (A). A buyer who reads CIF as covered is under-insured, and saying so costs us the easier sale.

What is ours is ours: short count, wrong SKU, stock delivered below the shelf life we committed to, and damage traceable to how the container was stuffed. Send the container number, the seal number, the packing list line the claim refers to, and photographs taken before the cartons are broken down. The window is seven days from devanning, and a broken or mismatched seal is the exception that has to be raised at delivery instead; the terms of sale set out both, and why seven days rather than the forty-eight hours this trade tends to write.

Every question on this page is asked per SKU and per shipment: which site made it, what scheme that site holds, what remaining shelf life it will leave with, what labelling your market needs, and which certificate of origin it will travel under. The trade desk answers those in writing before an order, and where the answer is that we do not know yet, it says so rather than guesses.

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