What is actually in place

We do not farm and we do not manufacture. Most of what a sustainability page normally covers belongs to the brand owner whose name is on the carton, and repeating it here would be describing someone else's work as ours.

• What belongs to the brand owner

  Formulation, primary packaging design, ingredient sourcing, factory energy and water, and the audit programmes covering those plants. Those certificates belong to the sites that hold them, and we pass them through rather than quoting them as ours.

• What belongs to us

  How full a container leaves and how it is loaded, the outer carton, pallet, wrap and dunnage we add to it, and the conditions in the warehouse where that work is done. The buying channel and the shelf life a carton carries are ours too, and the quality page is where both are set out in full.

Everything below sits on our side of that line. There is nothing here about renewable energy, water or waste to landfill, because a business that runs a warehouse and no plant has nothing true to say about any of them.

How full a container leaves is the part of this we control outright, and it is arithmetic rather than intention. The same act that lowers your cost per carton lowers the emissions each carton carries and the number of boxes that have to move at all, which is the only environmental claim on this page we can support from our own records.

A 20ft holds about 33 CBM and roughly 28 tonnes, a 40ft about 67 CBM and roughly 26.7 tonnes, and a 40ft high cube about 76 CBM and roughly 26.3 tonnes, though a road weight limit at one end or the other usually bites before the container's own limit does. Canned drinks, liquid detergent, toothpaste and fabric softener reach the weight limit with cube to spare; biscuits, crisps, tissue, instant noodles and confectionery reach the cube limit at half the payload. A single-category load therefore either ships air or ships light, and a mixed load is what closes that gap.

This avoids shipping air, and it avoids the repeat part-loads that follow from shipping air. It does not make an ocean container low-carbon, and we do not present it as though it did.

The standard for transport emissions is EN ISO 14083:2023, and the GLEC Framework is its practical translation. On FOB terms you book the ocean leg, so the primary data sits with you and your carrier rather than with us, and any figure we modelled would be a worse version of one you can already obtain at source.

Published factors for deep-sea container transport run from roughly 10 to 40 g CO2e per tonne-km, a range wide enough that the factor you choose decides the answer. Those are defaults rather than measurements taken on our shipments, and the GLEC Framework is where to check them. We would rather you used your carrier's figure than ours.

What we can give you for any shipment is gross weight, cube, carton count and the port pair, which is what you or your carrier need to calculate to ISO 14083. Where the ocean booking is ours on CIF or CFR terms, ask the trade desk for the carrier and the voyage. The carrier's own data beats anything we could model, and it is traceable to a named source rather than to us.

Packaging obligations attach to whoever first places the goods on your market, and for imported filled goods that is you rather than us. EPR fees, packaging taxes and recycled-content thresholds are charged against your entry rather than our export, so nothing we do at this end reduces them and nothing we sign transfers them. What is ours is the transit packaging: the outer carton, the pallet, the wrap and the dunnage, whose materials, weights and dimensions we state in writing per shipment. We claim no recycled content, no forest certification and no standing pallet policy, because none is in place.

One rule does reach back to us. Under EU PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, the maximum 50% empty space ratio for grouped and transport packaging applies from 1 January 2030 and attaches to whoever fills the packaging, which for the carton, pallet and dunnage we add is us. It is a specification to agree with us rather than to discover in 2030.

We cannot register for, report to or pay into an EPR or packaging tax scheme in your market. We do not design the primary pack either, so what we hold on it is what the brand owner publishes, and we pass that through as it stands.

Vietnam's own recycling obligation, now set by Decree 110/2026/ND-CP and in force from 25 May 2026, falls on whoever produced or imported the goods, and packaging on goods for export is exempt. We are neither: we buy goods a Vietnamese manufacturer or a licensed importer has already placed on the domestic market, so that obligation attached upstream of us, and we make no claim about what it added to the price we pay. It is a point of law about someone else's liability rather than a credential of ours.

The EU Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026. Export cartons are out of scope, because packaging used solely to support, protect or carry another product is excluded even though paper sits inside Annex I. What reaches this catalogue is palm oil in noodles, snacks, soap and detergent, cocoa in confectionery and coffee in instant coffee. The due diligence statement is filed by the EU operator on plot-level geolocation only the brand owner's supply chain can generate, so ask for that statement at the specification stage. We cannot produce one that is missing.

The questions that actually arise in this trade are about the goods themselves: where they were bought, what is printed on them, and where they are allowed to be sold.

• Every carton is bought inside Vietnam against a VAT invoice, under an appointment we hold from the brand owner, from the distributor that brand owner appointed, or for the lines not made here from the licensed importer that brings them in. The buying channel is the part of product integrity a consolidator decides, and it is decided before the goods are ours.
• Batch and production codes reach you as the manufacturer printed them. A code that has been removed or covered cannot be matched to a plant, a date or a document, and it invites a customs officer to start opening cartons; the quality page sets out the trade mark law that also attaches to it.
• Where we already know a brand owner has appointed someone in your market, or that the goods would be turned back at your border, we say so before you order and decline the line rather than ship it quietly. What we cannot do is clear the market for you, because what we know about a given brand's arrangements is often nothing. The quality page sets out where trade mark exhaustion turns that into a border problem.
• Whether a formulation and a pack are legal in your market is yours to confirm, and we supply the artwork, ingredient list and pack details you confirm it against. Where we know a line is prohibited at destination, we decline the order.

None of that is a certification and none of it can be audited from a website. It is checkable against the invoice trail behind a shipment and the codes on the cartons themselves, and a third-party inspector, including one you nominate, can examine both before the container is sealed.

Short-dated stock is routinely moved into markets where enforcement is weaker, and Africa and the Pacific are the standard destinations. The 75% remaining shelf life we commit to on the quality page is one figure applied to every destination, and it does not fall because a market's own enforcement happens to be lighter. Nothing about a buyer's border makes a shorter-dated carton acceptable to us.

Stock that falls short of that figure is offered as short-dated, with its dates named, rather than folded quietly into a mixed load to clear it. Which markets enforce a remaining-life rule at the port of entry is on the quality page, because meeting our figure does not settle theirs.

We run our own warehouse, and what governs the work in it is Vietnamese statute rather than a code of conduct we wrote for ourselves. The Labour Code 2019 sets normal hours at no more than 8 a day and 48 a week, and caps overtime at 40 hours a month and 200 hours a year. The regional minimum wage from 1 January 2026 is set by Decree 293/2025/ND-CP, and the rate that applies turns on the region a workplace sits in, with Region I the highest at VND 5,310,000 a month.

Those are checkable in principle, and the evidence is payroll and social insurance registration rather than a paragraph on a website. An audit here would cover this warehouse and nothing beyond it. It would say nothing about the plants that made the goods, and any audit of those plants is the brand owner's to publish.

Stated plainly, because your audit will ask and a vague page wastes everyone's week:

• There is no third-party social or environmental audit of our warehouse: no Sedex membership, no SMETA audit, no ISO 14001 and no ISO 45001.
• We do not measure or publish a carbon footprint: no Scope 1, 2 or 3 inventory, no verified CO2e figure per shipment, no science-based target and no offsetting.
• We have no control over primary packaging design, and no take-back or recycling arrangement for transit packaging at destination.
• We hold no EPR registration in any destination market and have no capacity to act as your authorised representative.
• We publish no modern slavery statement: the UK duty under section 54 starts at £36 million of global turnover and Australia's at AUD 100 million, and we are below both. We hold no sustainability label and belong to no membership scheme.

If any of these becomes a requirement for your business, tell the trade desk what the requirement is. Whether we can meet it is a question with a real answer rather than a marketing one, and we answer a supplier questionnaire rather than deflecting it.

We do not describe our goods, our shipments or our warehouse as eco-friendly, green, carbon neutral or climate neutral, and we will not supply that language for your pack or your listing. Directive (EU) 2024/825 applies from 27 September 2026. It bans a generic environmental claim unless the trader can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to that claim, and it prohibits outright any offsetting-based claim of neutral, reduced or positive impact. In the UK the CMA has held direct consumer-law enforcement powers since 6 April 2025, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover, and its Green Claims Code sets out in writing how it reads an environmental claim.

Those rules bite on business-to-consumer communication, so they do not regulate this page. They regulate you the moment a phrase from a supplier's website reaches a pack or a retail listing, and the liability travels with the phrase.

What a shipment weighs, what it cubes, how it is packed for transit and how much shelf life it carries are answered against the specific offer rather than against this page. The trade desk answers them directly.

Contact the trade desk →