Doritos — Wholesale Supply

A flat triangle in a bag of gas

A tortilla chip is a flat, brittle triangle held in a bag of gas, and it breaks along a straight line under a load that would not mark a can or a jar. That is the fact this listing is organised around. Nothing else about Doritos is difficult — it is ambient, undemanding about temperature, and it sells everywhere — but it is one of the easiest things in a mixed pallet to turn into a claim, and the damage is done in the twenty minutes a load is being built rather than over the five weeks it is at sea. This page is about that, and the brand sits within the snacks we export from Madrid.

How a bagged chip actually fails

The gas fill is protection, not padding. It keeps the chips from grinding against each other in normal handling, and inside a well-built stack it does its job. What defeats it is sustained compression from above, and the two most common sources are a top layer heavier than the cartons below it were designed to carry, and a pallet that has been built with carton overhang so the corners take load the case walls were never meant to see.

Neither shows up as a burst bag. It shows up as a case of intact packaging full of fragments, discovered by your customer rather than by your goods-in team, which is the worst possible order in which to find out. The second failure mode is slower: a load that shifts inside a moving container, so the stack works against itself for a fortnight and arrives leaning. That one is preventable with wrap, corner boards and void fill, and it is entirely a loading decision.

The mixed pallet is where the trouble starts

Mixed-brand and mixed-category pallets are standard here and they are usually the right way for a mid-size importer to buy. They are also the situation in which a bagged snack is most likely to be crushed, because a mixed pallet contains things with very different densities and somebody has to decide the order they go in. Left to chance, the heavy cartons end up wherever they were picked.

1. Dense goods go on the floor of the pallet and the floor of the container — beverages, jars, cans, anything with real mass.
2. Medium-density cartons form the middle of the stack and take whatever top load is unavoidable.
3. Bagged snacks ride at the top, carrying nothing above them.
4. Layers are built square with no overhang, corner-boarded and stretch-wrapped to the base.
5. Voids are filled so nothing can gather momentum inside a moving box, and the layer make-up is written onto the packing list so the receiving warehouse can break the pallet down without opening cartons to find out what is where.

That last point is worth more than it sounds. A pallet whose composition is documented gets handled correctly at the far end; one that is not gets handled the way the forklift driver guesses. Our guide to pallets and container loading covers the general principles behind that sequence.

Groupage multiplies the handling

A full container is loaded once and opened once. A part-load is broken down and re-stacked at least once, by people who cannot see inside your cartons, have no interest in what is fragile and are working to somebody else's schedule. For most categories that is a minor consideration. For bagged snacks it is the main one.

It does not make LCL wrong — plenty of first orders should be part-loads rather than containers — but it changes how the consignment is built and it should be said at enquiry stage rather than after the booking. Buyers who want the crisp fixture covered without putting everything into bags often run the tortilla tier alongside a rigid-can line and price the Pringles listing on the same enquiry, since the can takes top load the bag cannot and gives the pallet a stable base.

Flavour designations belong on the purchase order

One thing to settle before quantities. The same recipe carries different names in different territories, and the cooling buttermilk-and-herb variant is the classic trap: it is sold as Cool American in parts of continental Europe and as Cool Original in the United Kingdom, and a buyer who writes a North American name on a purchase order will receive cartons marked with something else. The product may be right and the receiving query still happens.

So put a description beside the name. Say it is the cool herby one, or the sharp cheese one, or the hot one, and we will match that against European production and write the real pack designation and language into the offer before anything binds. If the name you have used has no European equivalent at all, you hear it in the first reply instead of at the discharge port. Ranges move too — the core runs all year while regional and limited seasonings appear and disappear on each plant's promotional schedule — so what is offered is what has been allocated to us, not what a catalogue lists.

Formats, and the counter each answers

There are four pack sizes and, in practice, four different customers behind them. The small bag turns over fast at a till, on a forecourt or in a vending drum, and is judged on margin per unit. The large bag is what modern trade runs its promotions on. Multipacks answer a household shop and sit in grocery and cash and carry. Catering cases go to kitchens and vending fillers who want volume through the door and never put a bag on display.

Weighting those four correctly is most of the ranging work, and you are better placed to judge it than we are — but tell us where the volume sells and a split comes back with the offer instead of a flat assortment. Cases, pallet patterns and gross weights shift with the format and with whichever production run has been allocated to us, so they belong to the specific consignment on the offer rather than to a published table. Date life at loading works identically: give us your floor and what can be met is confirmed before anything ships.

Terms, routing and what happens if something arrives damaged

Iguazu Trading, a trading name of Iguazu Fragancias SL, loads from Madrid. That is an inland point, so EXW Madrid means our premises and not a quay; the buyer on those terms owns the road leg. Valencia is roughly 355 km and Barcelona roughly 620 km, with Algeciras for transhipment and Coslada for rail. FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP are quoted; DDP is not offered as standard. 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. Stock is EU-produced and supplied in the manufacturer's sealed packaging, never re-boxed or relabelled; we are an independent distributor and hold no brand appointment.

If a consignment does arrive damaged, the useful evidence is gathered at devanning and not a week later — photographs of the stow before it is broken down, the container and seal numbers, and the layer detail from the packing list. How claims are handled sets out what we need and in what order.