Haribo — Wholesale Supply

The question that opens a Haribo enquiry

Very few buyers open a Haribo enquiry with a quantity. They open with composition. What is the sweet set with, where was that batch produced, and will it carry paperwork a listing authority accepts? Across a large share of the markets we ship into, that answer decides whether the rest of the offer is worth reading, so it is the first thing our desk settles and the first thing this page deals with.

The rest of gummy confectionery is comparatively undemanding. It is stable, cheap to move, fast to turn, and it forgives conditions that would ruin a chocolate load. Composition is the part that needs care, and it is the part most wholesale pages skate over.

Gelatine, pectin and starch are three different answers

A gummy is a sugar system held together by a setting agent, and the agent is not uniform across a range. Much of the classic chewy production is gelatine-set, and gelatine carries an animal origin that belongs to the plant that made it rather than to the name printed on the bag. Elsewhere in the same range, fruit gums, liquorice and foam formats are built on pectin, starch or a blend of the two and contain no gelatine at all. That is why a vegetarian listing can usually be assembled from part of a range and almost never from the whole of it, and why the question “is this brand suitable for my market” has no honest answer at brand level.

Separately certified production, made to its own specification at its own site and labelled accordingly, exists for markets where certification is a condition of listing rather than a shopper preference. Those are distinct products from distinct runs. They are not the same bag with an extra mark on the film, and they are not interchangeable inside an allocation.

Certification belongs to a production run, not to a brand

Our position on this is deliberately narrow, because the alternative is a claim we could not stand behind. We do not describe stock as certified at brand level. A certificate attaches to a defined production origin and a defined pack; an independent distributor cannot confer one and should not imply one. What we can do is work from your end of the problem. Give us the destination, the channel and whether your retail customer needs documentation on file for the listing application, and we will put in writing what the stock in front of us actually carries before you are committed to anything. Where the allocation available will not meet the requirement, we say so rather than shipping and hoping.

Raise it at enquiry stage, not at booking stage. It determines which allocation we chase on your account, and chasing takes considerably longer than pricing does. If you want to see how provenance is evidenced generally before you send anything, the way we document authenticity and compliance sets out what travels with a consignment and what can be checked at your own warehouse.

Why sugar confectionery is a different freight problem from chocolate

Buyers who have shipped chocolate tend to arrive carrying chocolate assumptions, and most of them do not transfer. Sugar confectionery does not bloom. There is no fat phase to migrate to the surface, so the cosmetic defect that gets a countline pallet rejected on sight is simply not available to a gummy. On a great many lanes that takes temperature-controlled equipment out of the conversation altogether, and with it a real slice of the landed cost.

What replaces it is a different failure set, worth knowing before you fix a sailing. Warmth softens a gummy rather than discolouring it. Pieces flatten under whatever is stacked above them, individual sweets weld into a single mass inside the bag, and sugar sanding or an acid coating loses its edge and drifts around the pack. None of that is a safety matter and none of it is bloom. All of it is a presentation failure, and in a category bought on sight in a couple of seconds, presentation is close to the entire proposition. Stow position, sailing weeks and the build handle it; refrigeration does not come into it. Name the port and the weeks you want to sail and you will get a straight view on whether the lane justifies controlled equipment or whether a dry box is the commercially sensible call.

The other inherited assumption worth correcting is about reordering. Gummies rarely fail because a container was badly planned; they fail because the shelf ran empty in week nine of a twelve-week cycle. In a category where the shopper substitutes instantly and without loyalty, a gap costs more than the stock in it was worth. We would rather build a repeating programme around your off-take than move one container and wish you well.

Formats, and the channel each one answers

Format tracks channel more tightly here than anywhere else in the sweet aisle, which is why an assortment lifted from one market rarely performs in the next. The small bag is a till, forecourt, kiosk and cinema product: a one-second decision on a small ticket. The pouch belongs to grocery and to an occasion spread across an evening, and it has been quietly taking facings off the singles in several markets. Tubs and catering formats go to operators who decant, whether that is a pick-and-mix wall, an events business or a hotel. Larger multipacks live in the weekly shop and among the discounters, where the job is basket size rather than impulse.

• Goldbears and the core chewy lines, plus Starmix and the mixed bags
• Sour, fizzy and coated formats where the market pulls them
• Small bags, pouches, minis, catering tubs and larger multipacks
• Mixed pallets across formats for a trial listing
• Case, pallet and full container load quantities

We publish no case counts, build patterns or coding windows here, since each of them tracks the format and whatever we hold in a given week. They go into the offer against stock we can see, which is the only kind of number worth planning around. The same applies to the rest of the confectionery we hold in Madrid: what is listed is what we trade, not what is guaranteed available on any particular Tuesday.

Order units, Incoterms and the document set

Orders run by the case, by the pallet or by the full container load, and mixed-brand pallets are ordinary rather than a concession. Loading is at our Madrid warehouse, which is what EXW Madrid means on our offers: the seller's premises inland, not a quay. From there the deep-sea gateways are Valencia at roughly 355 km and Barcelona at roughly 620 km, each about a day on the road. FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP are all available; DDP is not something we offer as standard, and we would rather tell you that at the start than negotiate backwards from it.

The paperwork that travels is the commercial invoice, packing list, export declaration and transport document, with a Certificate of Origin and, where a preferential trade agreement applies, an EUR.1 movement certificate. Stock is EU-produced and leaves in the manufacturer's own sealed cases, with the printed artwork, the declaration and the codes exactly as the producer applied them. We do not re-box, overlabel or relabel, and we are an independent distributor rather than an appointed one.

Buyers assembling a whole impulse bay usually want a chocolate anchor beside the sugar block and ask us to price the panned chocolate line on the same enquiry, since a shelled sweet behaves differently again on a warm lane. Listed brands are quoted inside one business day. Send the enquiry with a destination on it and what comes back carries a routing view, not only a figure.