Ariel Detergent — Wholesale Supply from Spain

The load stops at a weight, not at a wall

Detergent is the heaviest thing in this warehouse for the space it takes up, and everything commercially interesting about it follows from that. A container being filled with powder or liquid hits its permitted payload while there is still visible daylight above the pallets. The doors close on a box that looks part empty because it is at its legal limit, and no amount of stacking skill changes that.

So the useful question on an Ariel enquiry is never how many pallets fit. It is how much weight the whole chain will accept, and the chain has more links than most buyers count. There is the payload rating of the container itself. There is the road haulage limit on the Spanish leg, since we load inland in Madrid and run about three hundred and fifty kilometres to Valencia or six hundred and twenty to Barcelona before anything touches a ship. There is the equivalent limit at your end, which is a different number in a different jurisdiction and is frequently the binding one. And there are axle limits as well as gross limits, which is why where the weight sits in the box matters and not only how much of it there is.

So we set out the gross and net build before the truck is loaded rather than once it has gone, and the tonnage a given booking can legally carry goes onto the pro-forma against the allocation offered. We publish no standing figure for it, because it shifts with the mix of formats, the pack sizes, the pallet spec and the box you end up booking. What we will tell you plainly is when a proposed order cannot legally be carried as specified, which is a conversation better had at quotation. The general mechanics are covered in our guide to pallets and container loading. Ariel sits inside the household and cleaning range.

Three formats, three different cargoes

Format	Freight behaviour	Where it suits
Powder	Dense, robust, tolerant of long transit and warehouse heat; sealed packs survive rough handling	Value channels, long lanes, hand-wash markets
Liquid	Heaviest per wash delivered; closure integrity and leakage are the risk	Retail markets that have already moved to liquid
Capsules	Highest value per cubic metre; lightest of the three; most packaging rules attached	Modern trade and premium fixtures

Read that table as three separate businesses rather than three price points on one. A buyer who orders across all three is running three different supply problems, and a buyer who commits a whole container to one has made a decision about the lane as much as about the shelf.

Dose is the unit, not the kilo

Every competent detergent merchandiser in the world prices by wash, and buyers who cost by pack weight arrive at an uncompetitive shelf without understanding why. Concentrate, capsule and conventional powder each yield a different number of washes for every kilogram you pay freight on, so two packs that weigh the same are not the same proposition to the person buying them, and the line that reads cheapest per kilo on a purchase order can be the most expensive wash on the shelf.

Dosing conventions also differ by region, and that is a marketing problem as well as an arithmetic one. Where households are used to a heavy dose of a conventional powder, a concentrate that does the same job in a smaller scoop can be judged as weak by shoppers who have never been told the dose changed. If you are introducing a concentrated format into a market that has not run one, budget for shelf communication rather than assuming the pack does the work. Build your landed cost per wash before you fix the format split, and ask us for the declared wash count on the specific articles you are considering; we will confirm what the available packs state rather than quote a figure from memory.

Capsules carry rules the other formats do not

Single-dose liquid capsules are attractive freight and a serious compliance subject. In the EU they are sold under specific packaging and labelling requirements aimed at keeping children out of them: child-resistant fastening on the outer container, packaging that obscures the contents from view, an aversive agent, and warning wording on the pack. Several other jurisdictions have adopted their own version of the same idea, and a number of importing authorities examine this category more closely than they examine powder.

Two things follow for a buyer. First, the outer packaging is part of the product's compliance and cannot be treated as a shipping carton to be opened, split or replaced in a repacking operation at your end. Second, we will confirm for the specific articles offered what the packs carry and what the declarations say, and flag anything that bears on packing, stowage or the documents your entry requires. We do not assert a hazard classification for an individual article on a web page, because that attaches to a formulation and a pack rather than to a brand.

Leakage is a carton problem

Powder is the least demanding of the three to move. Liquid is not, and the reason is that a failure never stays local. A closure that weeps under vibration or a bottle that fails under top load damages everything in the cases around it, so a small loss of product becomes a large loss of saleable stock and an unpleasant discharge. Liquid pallets are built low, wrapped to the base, kept off the top tier, and stowed where a failure would not run into a neighbouring line. Where a mixed load contains both liquid detergent and dry ambient goods, they are separated as a matter of course.

Where each format actually sells

None of what follows is research; it is simply what crosses this desk. It is still a reasonable place to begin. Powder carries the import trade through most of Africa and much of the Middle East. Value formats, washing by hand and an acute sensitivity to cost per wash all push in the same direction, and a sealed bag of powder is indifferent to a long hot transit in a way a bottle is not. Capsules index to European retail and Gulf modern trade, where convenience has taken real fixture space. Liquid is at its strongest in European retail, western and eastern alike, and its case weakens with every additional sea mile. Balkan and Central European importers usually want the full ladder across all three so that one fixture covers a value and a convenience price point.

Because a detergent load runs out of weight long before it runs out of room, what shares the box is a planning decision worth making early. Light, bulky, fast-rotating lines are the answer, and nappies by the pallet are the extreme case: a few pallets of them turn a legally full but visibly half-empty detergent container into a balanced one. Buyers whose market shelves the other big laundry name instead can take Tide from the same warehouse on the same offer.