Lavazza — Wholesale Supply

The pallet that fits nothing

The single most expensive mistake in this category is a pallet of capsules that do not fit anything at destination. It happens more often than it should, and it almost never happens because the buyer chose the wrong brand. It happens because the order was placed against a brand name when it needed to be placed against a machine. A capsule is a consumable for a specific piece of hardware; if the hardware in your market does not take it, the coffee inside is irrelevant and the stock is unsellable at any price. That is the frame this page uses, and it is why the Lavazza listing reads differently from the rest of our coffee and tea range.

The machine at the far end, not the name on the box

Ask what is installed before asking what to list. Households and offices buy hardware once and then buy consumables for years, so the population of machines already sitting on counters in your market is the ceiling on what any capsule listing can sell. A market where one system dominates the installed base will absorb depth on a handful of references. A market with three systems in circulation needs a narrower, deliberately chosen spread across all three, or you end up financing two-thirds of a range that only a third of the customers can use.

None of that is visible from a brand catalogue, and none of it is something a supplier can decide for you. What we can do is quote against the system you name and tell you plainly when a reference does not exist in the format you have asked for, rather than shipping the nearest thing and letting the difference emerge in a receiving bay.

Three kinds of capsule, and why the difference is commercial

It is worth being precise about the categories, because trade enquiries routinely mix them together.

There are capsules made for a roaster's own closed system, where the machine and the consumable are designed as one product and the range is what the brand chooses to make. There are capsules built to fit a system originally launched by somebody else, which is a large and legitimate part of the European market and which turns on dimensional compatibility rather than on branding. And there are the professional and office systems, sold into workplaces and hospitality with their own hardware base, their own service arrangements and buyers who behave nothing like a grocery buyer.

Some systems will also read a code on the capsule and refuse anything not made for them, which means compatibility is a binary property rather than a matter of degree. Availability across all three groups varies by market and by production week, so we confirm what is actually allocated against the references you name instead of publishing a list that dates badly.

How a capsule order gets confirmed here

1. You name the system or systems your market runs, in the words the machine uses.
2. You name the references you intend to list, and the depth you expect to turn on each.
3. We check that against what is genuinely allocated to us in the week you are ordering.
4. Anything unavailable is flagged before the offer goes out, not after.
5. The confirmed spread, pack language, dating and quantities go on the pro-forma, which is the only document the order is fixed against.

That sequence exists because capsule listings fail on assortment far more often than on price. A capsule shelf that looks incomplete gets shopped elsewhere, so the mix matters more than depth on any single line — which is the opposite of how a bean order behaves.

Beans and ground packs for the accounts a capsule cannot serve

Around the single-serve tier sits the part of the range that a capsule buyer never touches. The 1kg whole bean bag is a professional input bought by blend for a machine that is already calibrated, and the accounts taking it — cafés, hotels, restaurant groups, bean-to-cup vending operators — reorder on a rhythm rather than on promotion. Retail ground packs carry the supermarket facing and are bought on shelf presence and blend recognition.

The blends themselves are not interchangeable between markets, and this is where a supplier can do real damage cheaply. A market accustomed to a lighter, more aromatic cup will notice a darker substitution immediately, and a swap made to suit a supplier is a reliable way to lose a listing. Name the blends you range and each one is confirmed, or not, by name. Where a European roast-and-ground line has to sit beside the Italian one, buyers frequently price the Jacobs listing at the same time so the vacuum-brick tier and the espresso tier arrive on one booking and one set of documents.

Branded stock, not private label

Searching for coffee at volume turns up a great many contract roasters and capsule fillers offering to put any name on any product. That is a different business from ours and it is worth stating the difference in plain terms. We do not roast, blend, fill, pack or brand anything. We buy and re-export genuine brand-owner stock, EU-produced, in the manufacturer's own sealed packaging, with the producer's artwork, ingredient declaration, batch coding and date coding as applied at source. Nothing is re-boxed or relabelled by us. Where a destination requires an additional panel at import, over-labelling is an agreed and priced line on the order rather than something assumed into the price. Iguazu Trading is an independent distributor and holds no appointment, licence or exclusivity from any brand named on this site.

Quantities, dating and the terms an order loads against

Two things buyers ask us to publish and we will not. Case counts and pallet builds vary by format — a capsule pallet and a bean pallet are not comparable objects — so they are stated against the consignment actually offered rather than as a fixed table. Remaining shelf life on loading is handled the same way: tell us the minimum your entry and your customers require and it is confirmed in writing before dispatch. Both live on the pro-forma.

Goods load in Madrid, which is an inland point, so EXW here means our premises and not a port. Valencia sits roughly 355 km away and Barcelona roughly 620 km, with Algeciras as the transhipment option and Coslada for rail. FOB, CFR, CIF and DAP are all quoted; DDP is not offered as standard. Each consignment travels 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. Buyers new to the process will find the recurring questions — order units, documents, how an allocation is confirmed — answered on the buyer FAQ.