Häagen-Dazs — Wholesale Supply

Everything else in our confectionery range travels ambient in a dry box. Häagen-Dazs does not. It is ice cream, it moves frozen, and it moves on a chain that has to hold continuously from our loading bay to your customer's freezer without a single unmonitored gap. That difference is not a detail bolted onto a product page; it governs the equipment, the cost, the lead time, the paperwork and, more than anything, whether we are willing to quote the order at all. Iguazu Trading exports the line from Madrid as genuine EU-produced stock in the manufacturer's own sealed packaging, worldwide.

Continuity is the hard part, not the temperature

A reefer container is not a cold box. It is a refrigeration machine, and a machine needs power. It has to be brought down to temperature before anything goes inside it, run on power while it is loaded at our bay, run again on the road, kept live through every wait at a terminal or a yard, socketed into the vessel's plugs for the crossing, and put straight back on power when it lands, for however long clearance and collection take.

Very little goes wrong at sea. What goes wrong is the standing time at either end, when a unit sits unplugged and drifts upward while somebody works through documents. The damage that follows is a partial thaw and a refreeze, and it cannot be undone: the texture coarsens, crystals form through the product, and texture is most of what anyone is paying a premium for here. It cannot be inspected away on arrival and it cannot be reversed. So the set point, the pre-cooling, the plug-in plan and the temperature recording are agreed as part of the booking rather than assumed, and they are written into the pro-forma with the commercial terms.

What we ask before we quote

These questions come before price, and they are asked in this order.

1. Will there be cold-store space free on the day the box lands, or does it wait?
2. Wherever it waits — terminal, yard or your own site — is there a socket for it?
3. Does the final delivery leg run on a refrigerated vehicle?
4. Can the consignee take frozen pallets in without leaving them standing on an open dock?
5. What does your inspecting authority want to see for frozen food at entry, and how long does clearance normally run at that port?

Answer all five and you are set up for this category. If two or three of them have no answer yet, that is the work to do before an order rather than after it, and we will say so instead of booking a unit and letting the gap arrive with the goods. On this line, turning an order down is sometimes the more useful thing we can do.

Full reefer load or temperature-controlled groupage

There are two realistic ways to move it, and they are different risk profiles rather than a better and a worse option.

Take a whole unit and the set point is yours, the seal is yours, and no other cargo shares the chain. That is the tidier arrangement as soon as volume justifies it. Buy space in a shared temperature-controlled load instead and the category opens up at much smaller quantities, but your pallets are built into and then pulled out of somebody else's shipment, so there is more handling, more door-opening, and more time held at a temperature you did not choose. Neither answer is wrong. The mistake is not knowing which of the two you bought, and finding out from the product.

Temperature records do two jobs

Reefer movements generate a record of the set point and the running data, and that record is worth more than most importers realise. It works at inspection, where the assessment of frozen foodstuffs at entry commonly involves a temperature check alongside the documentary review, and it works again in a dispute, because it is the only evidence that separates a chain failure at sea from one in a yard after clearance. Without it, a claim about texture is one party's opinion against another's.

Say at enquiry stage what your authority expects to see on arrival, and the booking and the paperwork can be built to satisfy both together. The commercial documents themselves are the ordinary ones — invoice, packing list, export declaration, transport document, Certificate of Origin, and a EUR.1 movement certificate where a preferential agreement between the EU and your destination applies — with the temperature evidence added on top of them.

Formats and the freezer space they earn

Tubs, small cups, stick bars and multipacks are all available subject to allocation, and choosing between them is really a decision about how to spend cabinet capacity — the tightest constraint in every channel this product reaches. Small cups go to hotels, catering and plated dessert service where portion control matters. Tubs are the take-home and premium grocery unit. Sticks and multipacks are what moves through supermarket cabinets and travel retail once the weather turns.

Annual demand is not what caps a frozen listing; cold-store and cabinet space is. That usually argues for phasing a programme over several modest consignments rather than one large arrival, particularly in temperate markets where the season comes and goes quickly. Case configurations and builds are settled on the offer against stock we can genuinely load in the window you need.

What we will not do

Dry goods do not go into a unit that is running for ice cream, even where there is room and a buyer asks for it. Carrying a container that is not quite full costs less than carrying one whose contents cannot be sold. Where both are wanted, we price two consignments timed to land together: the frozen booking and a separate ambient one, a single commercial relationship and two sets of transport terms. Buyers pairing a frozen dessert programme with an ambient countline commonly price Bounty on that second consignment.

Nor will we price this as though it were one more pallet of ambient confectionery. The booking type differs, the cost base differs, and the amount of forward notice it needs differs. Treating it as interchangeable with a dry load is where most first frozen orders come unstuck. Stock is EU-produced and supplied in the manufacturer's sealed packaging, never re-boxed or relabelled. We are an independent distributor holding no appointment from any brand owner, and we supply trade buyers only. Terms are EXW Madrid or FOB for buyers arranging their own frozen carriage, and CIF or DAP where we carry it; DDP is not offered as standard.