7Days Bakery Snacks — Wholesale Supply

No, it does not need a reefer

The most common thing we end up correcting on this line is a booking question: no, it does not need a reefer. Buyers meet the word bakery and reach for the cold chain out of habit, and half of them then park the category because a temperature-controlled programme is not something they want to run. 7Days is the line that made bakery exportable precisely by removing that requirement. It is an ambient, individually wrapped, shelf-stable product engineered for distribution rather than for a bake-off counter, and it travels in the same dry box as the biscuits and confectionery in the rest of our snacks export range.

Ambient is the design, not a compromise

Take the cold chain out of a bakery shipment and a surprising amount goes with it. No reefer booking and no plug points to argue about. No genset on the road leg. No temperature log to reconcile at the discharge port and no argument about who owns an excursion that happened somewhere in the middle of a sailing. No chilled infrastructure needed at your end either, which is usually the real barrier: an importer can list this without owning a single refrigerated pallet space.

What that leaves is a load that behaves like ambient grocery. The cases go into a standard dry container, into an ordinary warehouse, onto an ordinary shelf. It is why buyers who would never contemplate a chilled bakery programme into West Africa or South Asia will run an ambient one without hesitating, and why the category tends to arrive in a market alongside sweet biscuits rather than alongside anything refrigerated. Buyers ranging the sweet impulse tier as a whole frequently price Lotus Biscoff on the same enquiry, since the two occupy adjacent slots and consolidate onto one set of documents without difficulty.

What ambient does not mean

It does not mean indifferent. A wrapped pastry is robust in handling terms and quite particular about its environment, and it carries a date that does not forgive a slow customs entry. Two things therefore decide whether an ambient bakery listing makes money rather than write-offs: how the dating is governed, and how the cartons are stowed. The rest of this page is about those two.

Our position on shelf life is fixed and we would rather state it than be asked. The declared life belongs to the manufacturer. The number that decides your clearance is the life remaining on arrival, which is a function of the dating on the allocation, the sailing and how quickly your entry is processed. So we do not publish a figure. We work backwards from yours instead: give us the floor your customs entry will accept and the floor your buyers will accept, and the offer states the dating we can genuinely load against, together with the week the load is being built for.

For a dated line that discipline is the whole margin. It is also the reason a first order should be sized against your actual rotation rather than against the freight arithmetic, because a container that lands cheaply and sells slowly is not a saving.

The sub-ranges, and which of your buyers takes each one

The brand is a range rather than a single product, and the sub-ranges answer to different people inside your own business:

• Filled croissants — the volume line, in cocoa, vanilla, chocolate and fruit-cream fillings; forecourt and kiosk stock.
• Bake Rolls — the savoury crisp bread snack, which competes with crisps for shelf space rather than with pastry.
• Cake bars and Swiss rolls — sponge formats for sweet impulse and lunchbox ranging.
• Mini and to-go pastries — sharing and multi-piece packs for grocery and value channels.
• Fineti — the hazelnut and cocoa spread, which belongs on a grocery fixture and not on a counter rack.

Order along those lines rather than by filling. A forecourt manager, a grocery buyer and a savoury-snack buyer will each take a different slice of that list and none of them will want all of it. Which fillings and which pack sizes are running at any given moment is set by the producing plants' own schedules, so an offer describes stock we can put our hands on that week rather than a standing assortment.

Stowage on a hot route

Two environmental risks matter on a long sea leg, and both are addressed at loading rather than argued about at arrival.

The first is temperature gradient. A box standing in the sun is not one environment but several, and the tiers against the outboard wall or immediately below the roof live somewhere quite different from the middle of the stow. Pastry therefore rides inboard and low, clear of the doors, with nothing heavy planned above it. The second is the water a container makes for itself: air loaded warm and humid hands that moisture back as condensation once the box cools overnight, and it lands on whatever sits beneath. Desiccant, a wrap and pallet build that shed it rather than trap it, and cases on dunnage at both ends of the trip are what answer that.

None of it is clever, and all of it depends on knowing the lane before the pallets are picked. Name the port of discharge, the time of year and whether you are taking a whole box or a share of one, and the stow is drawn up against those three. How a shipment is routed and handed over sets out the general process.

Individually wrapped is what opens the channel

Wrapping each piece is what lets this category work at a till rather than behind a counter. Nothing has to be sliced, nothing needs a heated cabinet, nothing is thrown out at close, and nobody on the payroll has to know how to bake. The unit stands in a rack beside the tills or the coffee machine and is picked up on the same reflex that sells a chocolate bar. For a forecourt, a kiosk, a transport hub, a canteen or a small convenience store, that is a fast-turning sweet line available to a site with no bakery of any description — which is exactly why the format opens markets where in-store bakery barely exists.

Brand ownership, packaging and the papers

Listing forms and customs entries sometimes ask who stands behind the trademark, so for the record: the brand originates with Chipita, a baked-snacks business built in Central and Eastern Europe, and Mondelez International completed its acquisition of Chipita in January 2022. That is background, nothing more. Iguazu Trading, a trading name of Iguazu Fragancias SL, is an independent distributor of genuine brand-owner stock and holds no appointment, licence or exclusivity from any brand named on this site.

Everything printed on the case and the wrapper was printed at the plant — graphics, ingredients, allergens, batch and date marks — and the packaging leaves here sealed as it arrived. We do not open cases and we do not apply our own labels. We load from Madrid on EXW — our premises, not a port — or on FOB, CFR, CIF or DAP through Valencia at roughly 355 km or Barcelona at roughly 620 km, with Algeciras for transhipment and Coslada for rail. 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. Recurring questions about order units, documents and how an allocation is confirmed are answered on the buyer FAQ.