Six accounts, from a single 25 kg bag to twelve containers a year
Order sizes, dates, landed costs per kilogram, freight modes and the parts that went wrong. Two of these six had a specification failure — one of them was ours — and both are written up here in full rather than edited out.
The six case studies below are realistic worked examples, not verified customer histories. This is a new site with no shipping record behind them yet. They were built from real industry economics the price bands, freight costs, minimums and lead times published elsewhere on this site to show the structure and level of detail a credible B2B case study needs: what was ordered, when, at what price, and what went wrong.
Before launch, each must either be replaced with a genuine account the customer's written permission to publish, their real figures, and ideally a photograph of the actual shipment or clearly relabelled on the page as an illustrative scenario. Do not leave it ambiguous.
Every customer name here is a placeholder in [square brackets] for that reason. Inventing named customers who do not exist, or presenting modelled figures as a real history, is a misrepresentation risk under FTC rules on deceptive advertising and endorsements. Fill the brackets, or take the study down.
Six accounts covering every way people buy this material
A three-person spice brand and a grocery chain taking twelve containers a year ask the same three questions: what does it cost landed, what happens if the spec is wrong, and how do I scale from here.
Every figure ties to the price page
The per-kilogram numbers come out of the published August 2026 price bands. If a figure here does not reconcile with those tables, the tables win.
Two of the six went wrong
One buyer ordered the wrong grain fraction. One container failed a moisture spec because of something we did. Both are written up with the readings and remedy.
25 kg trial to a monthly pallet
[Customer name] Austin, Texas. Three-person spice brand selling into independent grocers and a farmers' market stall.
The mistake came first. They took the free 2 kg sample in month 0 and asked for 2–5 mm coarse, because coarse crystals photograph better. Coarse is wrong for a shaker top: it bridges over the holes, then comes out in a rush. They lost three weeks. We should have asked what the packaging was before shipping, and now do.
Two things in the table are worth pulling out. At 25 kg, $209 of the $250 was transport. And the move to LCL sea at month 8 took transit from three days to six weeks door to door, forcing them to plan inventory properly for the first time.
Private label opened at month 11 at 500 kg per SKU: their artwork, their 110 g grinder-topped jars, a proof signed off before the run. They now take 800 kg a month, ordered 2,400 kg quarterly. Two-thirds of the fall from $10.00 to $1.61 came from freight, not from unit price.
| Month | Quantity | Mode | Salt | Freight | Landed / kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 2 kg sample, wrong grade | Courier | Free | $71 | — |
| 1 | 25 kg fine | Courier | $41 | $209 | $10.00 |
| 4 | 200 kg fine | Courier | $256 | $430 | $3.43 |
| 8 | 500 kg fine | LCL sea | $490 | $760 | $2.50 |
| 11 | 500 kg, private label | LCL sea | $490 | $795 | $2.57 |
| 14+ | 2,400 kg / quarter | LCL sea | $2,208 | $1,650 | $1.61 |
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A salt room fitted for under $9k in salt
[Customer name] Toronto, Ontario. Day spa adding a halotherapy room: 44 m² of backlit 8×4×2 in wall brick plus a loose salt floor.
The arithmetic. An 8×4 in brick face covers 0.0207 m², so a tight-laid wall takes about 48 bricks per square metre 2,112 across 44 m². Their contractor wanted to order 2,150 and top up if needed. A top-up is 12–18 days of production plus five weeks of transit, on a room with a booked opening date.
The 12% we insisted on. Salt brick is a natural mineral cut on a saw, and you lose material at every internal corner, at every cut around a light channel, and to fissures that only show when a brick is halved. A 12% allowance took the order to 2,365; we shipped 2,400 as a round palletised quantity. They used 2,369, a real waste rate of 12.2%, and finished with 31 spare rather than a four-week hole in the schedule.
Cost and routing. 2,400 bricks at $3.15 is $7,560; 1,200 kg of 5–8 mm extra coarse at $0.78 covered 18 m² of floor at 50 mm depth, another $936. $8,496 ex-works on 6,720 kg. Vancouver was $410 cheaper on the ocean leg and lost once the 3,400 km rail move east was priced in: $2,980 all-in via Montreal against $4,470.
Classification, hedged properly. Decorative wall brick and food-grade salt are not necessarily the same thing to a Canadian border officer, and the Safe Food for Canadians regime applies to food. Their broker took the position that neither the brick nor the floor salt was imported as a food. We are an exporter, not a licensed customs broker, and give no classification advice; we stated the intended use on the invoice and supplied our standard lab report. Confirm with your own broker before booking.
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Twelve containers a year for a grocery label
[Customer name] regional grocery chain, 148 stores. Moved its store-brand pink salt off a domestic repacker and onto direct import.
Why they moved. Their repacker was buying the same Pakistani rock salt, filling a 454 g grinder jar and a 340 g shaker, and charging a delivered price equivalent to $2.85 per kilogram of packed product. Direct import to their artwork jar, label, carton, freight, brokerage and drayage inside the number came to $1.87, about $215,000 a year on 220 metric tons. Switching cost $38,400 and paid back in just over nine weeks.
Then the first container failed. Their spec was moisture at or below 0.50%. Four of the twenty pallets tested at 0.87% at their receiving lab. Grinder mechanisms clumped, they pulled roughly 1,900 units off shelf, and the launch was held by five weeks.
Cause. We tested moisture at lot release, after drying and screening and before the material entered the packing hall. Loading was in late July, humidity in the hall ran at 78% relative for three days, and screened salt sat open on the filling line long enough to take up moisture our certificate could not see. The certificate was accurate. It measured the wrong point.
What we changed, and what it cost us. A dehumidified holding room of 46 m² held at or below 45% relative humidity, where screened material now sits between grading and filling. And a moisture check at bagging as well as at lot release, every 90 minutes, logged against the lot. On the second attempt that check caught a lot at 0.61% before loading. We replaced the four affected pallets at our own cost on the next sailing about $4,900, no debit-note argument.
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500 kg of licks to three containers a year
[Customer name] feed distributor, US Midwest, serving co-ops and farm stores in four states.
The trial. 500 kg is our minimum on lick salt, because a compression press has to be set up whether you want a hundred licks or ten thousand. That bought 100 plain compressed 5 kg licks at $0.86 per kg $430 of salt against $840 of freight, landing at $2.54 a kilogram on a product that costs $0.52 at container volume.
Registration. Animal feed products generally require state-by-state registration in the United States, and the labelling framework most states work from is the AAFCO model. The distributor filed those registrations themselves; they are the party of record and we could not do it for them. We supplied the label copy, the guaranteed analysis and the lot-coded certificates behind it eleven states in the first year, at roughly $25 to $100 per product per state.
Why it became two SKUs. The fortified lick carried copper at around 300 ppm, a normal inclusion for beef cattle. Sheep are markedly more sensitive to dietary copper it accumulates in the liver and can release in a fatal haemolytic crisis and several of their farm-store accounts sell into mixed flocks and herds where the same block ends up in the wrong paddock. Rather than rely on a label warning they split the line, adding a plain lick with no added copper, labelled for sheep, in a different wrapper colour.
Seasonality. Demand spikes in autumn as cattle come off pasture. For two years they raised the order in September, the container landed in November with the season half gone, and they discounted the tail. Door to door is eight to ten weeks. They now order in July. Nothing about the product changed. They moved a date.
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50 lamps to 2,000 a run, and the margin nobody quotes
[Customer name] Amazon US seller, home and wellness category, two-person operation.
First order. 50 mixed pieces, our lamp minimum: 35 natural 2–3 kg on wood bases at $5.80 and 15 natural 5–7 kg at $10.40, so $359 of goods, plus $520 of air freight on 140 kg gross. Landed $17.58 a piece before a single Amazon fee. It existed to validate the listing, not to make money.
The cord certification issue. In month five, their closest competitor on the same keyword was delisted. The cord set on that competitor's lamps carried no NRTL mark, and a lamp cord is the component that put roughly 80,000 units into a US recall in 2017. Our prices include a UL or ETL certified cord set, so our buyer answered the compliance request in a day. If a lamp quote sits materially below our published lamp bands, the cord is usually why.
Breakage, and the move to sea. On the 2,000-piece order, 36 arrived cracked or with a sheared base 1.8%. Our terms credit breakage above 2%, so they carried all 36, and they were right to raise it: a threshold sitting just above the realistic rate never pays out. Orders one and two flew at roughly $4.60 of freight per piece; from order three, LCL sea at 14 CBM and $2,050 of charges, or $1.03 a piece.
The honest margin. Landed cost into an Amazon fulfilment centre is $5.90 a piece. Against a $19.99 sale: referral fee $3.00, fulfilment on a heavy fragile unit $6.35, advertising $2.40, and returns and damage at 6.5% of revenue, mostly unresellable, $1.30. That leaves $1.04, or 5.2%. Their listing-research tool had shown 34%, because it counted landed cost and referral fee and nothing else.
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20 cooking blocks to 400 a year, after we fixed our own sorting
[Customer name] restaurant supply distributor, US Northeast, selling to independent kitchens and a small chain group.
Where it started. 20 grilling blocks, 8×8×2 in, at $16.20 each and $290 of courier on 90 kg. Landed $30.70 a block. They came back for 120 within the month.
Then the returns started. Across the first two quarters, 14% of blocks sold came back cracked. Most of that was end-user handling: a block taken from room temperature to grill heat in under ten minutes splits along its bedding plane, and one washed under a tap fails on the next cycle. Not all of it, though. On the first two orders we filled the last carton with borderline blocks visible fissures we should have downgraded to make the count. A share of that 14% was ours.
The leaflet. The cheapest fix was a printed care leaflet in every carton, produced and inserted at our end: heat in stages to about 260°C over at least 40 minutes, never wet-wash, scrape and wipe while warm, and expect the block to darken, thin and eventually crack, because it is a consumable with a life of 20 to 40 heat cycles. Returns were rarely faulty blocks. They were customers nobody had told that the product wears out. The rate fell to 4.6%.
A-grade and B-grade. A-grade has no visible fissure over 20 mm, square edges and a tight colour band, and goes to kitchens that will heat it. B-grade carries cosmetic fissures and colour variation and sells unheated for serving and gift sets. About 22% of cut blocks land in B, a yield cost that has to sit somewhere. Rather than bury it by upgrading B into A cartons we price the two separately A at $11.80, B at $8.40 and they take both, alongside 2 metric tons of 2–5 mm coarse finishing salt at $0.92 per kg.
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What these six have in common
Different products, different countries, different order sizes. Five things repeat.
Every one of them started small
Not one opened with a container. A trial order is where the spec gets settled while a mistake still costs hundreds rather than tens of thousands.
Every one hit a specification problem
Wrong grain fraction. Moisture out of spec. Copper in the wrong paddock. Cracked blocks. A cord with no NRTL mark. In four of the six it surfaced after the first order an argument for writing the spec down in numbers, not adjectives.
None optimised on price alone
The grocery chain switched for a documented moisture spec and a plant it had walked through. The lamp seller paid more for a certified cord and kept a listing its competitor lost. Choosing on price alone means choosing whoever is most willing to leave something out of the number.
Freight decided more money than negotiation
Air to sea saved $3.57 a lamp; Montreal instead of Vancouver saved $1,490 on one shipment. Argue routing and Incoterm before cents per kilogram.
Everything took longer than the buyer planned for
Production plus ocean transit plus customs is eight to ten weeks on most lines, and every account here underestimated it at least once the feed distributor by a whole selling season. Build the calendar backwards from the date you need stock on a shelf and add a fortnight.
Send us a spec — we quote within one working day
Tell us the grade, grain size, packing and destination port. You get a written quotation, a specification sheet, and a sample on its way the same week. Trial orders start at 25 kg.