Himalayan salt cooking blocks, slabs and tiles, sold by a supplier who will talk about cracking
Grilling plates, serving slabs, cheese tiles, shot glasses, bowls and mortars, sawn and finished in Punjab. Every block is tap-tested for internal fissures before it is wrapped, graded A or B on crystal structure, and shipped with a care leaflet that tells your customer the truth about how long it will last.
What we cut, and which of it should ever meet a flame
Blocks are sawn from selected seam material, faced on a diamond wheel, then hand-finished. We keep five standard rectangular sizes plus the turned pieces. Everything below is quoted in inches because that is how the North American trade buys, with millimetres alongside for your spec sheet and your customs broker.
8×8×2 in 203×203×51 mm approx. 4.5 kg / 10 lb
The workhorse grilling plate and our highest-volume line. Two inches of thickness is what lets a block take direct heat repeatedly without splitting. Fits a standard burner grate and most gas grills.
12×8×1.5 in 305×203×38 mm approx. 5.0 kg / 11 lb
Serving slab shape, and the size that photographs best on a table. It will handle low direct heat if it is A grade, but most of these sell for chilled service, charcuterie and cheese.
12×12×2 in 305×305×51 mm approx. 10.2 kg / 22.5 lb
Large grill block. Heavy enough that your packaging needs a warning about lifting it hot, and heavy enough that freight per piece is a real line in your costing.
8×4×1 in 203×102×25 mm approx. 1.1 kg / 2.4 lb
Tile. Sold in fours and sixes as a place-setting set, or by the hundred for wall and sauna cladding. Not a grilling item.
6×6×0.75 in 152×152×19 mm approx. 0.95 kg / 2.1 lb
Cheese and serving tile, our cheapest piece and a strong gift-set component. At three-quarters of an inch it belongs on a table, never on a burner.
Turned pieces
Shot glasses at roughly 50×50 mm and 160 g, sold in sets of four. Bowls from 4 to 6 inches, 0.7 to 1.6 kg. Mortar and pestle sets around 5 inches and 2.6 kg. All lathe-turned, all slower to make than a sawn block, all priced accordingly.
Custom cuts
Any rectangle up to 16×12 in, thickness from 0.5 to 3 in, minimum 200 pieces per size because a new dimension means resetting the saw line. Send a drawing with a tolerance. Ours is ±3 mm on cut dimensions and ±2 mm on thickness, which is what sawn rock salt will actually hold.
Weights are calculated at a halite density of 2.1–2.2 g/cm³ and are approximate. Natural voids and veining move an individual piece a few per cent either way.
One 8×8×2 grilling plate, one 6×6 cheese tile and a set of four shot glasses, couriered. Credited against your first order over 200 pieces.
Every salt block cracks eventually. Say so, and your returns collapse.
This is the part of the category most suppliers will not put in writing. We handle enough breakage claims to know that almost all of them come from one of three places: a fissure we should have caught, an end user who went straight to high heat, or a retail listing that implied the block was permanent.
Why it happens
Halite is a poor conductor of heat and a brittle crystal. Put a cold block on a hot burner and the bottom face expands while the core does not. That gradient is the stress, and the block relieves it by splitting. Add an internal fissure a healed crack or a clay-filled seam invisible from the outside and the split has somewhere to start.
What we do about the fissures
Every block is tap-tested before it is wrapped. A finished block is held on a padded edge and struck with a light nylon mallet. Sound material rings; a piece with an internal fissure gives a dull, dead thud. It takes a couple of seconds per block and it is the single most useful quality step in this product. Anything that thuds is pulled, and depending on the fault it goes to the tile saw, the brick line or the crusher. On a normal production run we reject 6 to 9 per cent of finished blocks this way. That rejection rate is priced into what you pay, and it is the reason our block price is not the lowest quote you will receive.
The heating procedure your customer needs
Low heat for about 15 minutes. Medium for about 15 minutes. High for about 15 minutes. Then cook. Cool it the same way, on the switched-off burner, for at least two hours before it is moved. That is the whole method, it is not negotiable, and it is why the leaflet matters more than the block.
Straight onto high heat. Heating a wet block, or one that was washed the night before and is still damp inside. A dishwasher, which will dissolve a serious fraction of it in one cycle. Liquid marinade poured onto a hot surface it flashes to steam inside the pores and blows a piece out.
Under 1.5 in the block cannot hold a survivable gradient across its thickness and fails far sooner on direct heat. We will sell you 0.75 in and 1 in tiles all day, and we will argue with you if you want to market them for grilling.
The commercial point
A grilling block is consumable kitchenware. Treated properly, an 8×8×2 plate gives dozens of uses, thins as it goes, and then breaks. Treated badly it lasts one dinner party. Retailers who print a use range and a care method sell the same block at the same price and take a fraction of the returns, because the customer who expected a lifetime item is the customer who files a claim. We have seen buyers cut block return rates by more than half without changing anything except the words on the box.
Indicative FOB Karachi prices per piece
US dollars, August 2026, individually wrapped, care leaflet in the carton, plain brown master carton. Indicative, not a binding offer. Turned pieces carry more labour than sawn ones, which is the whole reason a bowl costs more than a tile of similar weight.
| Item | Metric | Approx. weight | 20–100 pcs | 100–500 | 500–2,000 | Container |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6×6×0.75 in cheese tile | 152×152×19 mm | 0.95 kg | $6.20 | $5.40 | $4.90 | $4.50 |
| 8×4×1 in tile | 203×102×25 mm | 1.1 kg | $6.50 | $5.70 | $5.10 | $4.80 |
| Shot glasses, set of 4 | 50×50 mm each | 0.64 kg / set | $7.00 | $6.10 | $5.60 | $5.20 |
| Bowl, 5 in | 127 mm | 1.2 kg | $12.00 | $10.30 | $9.20 | $8.40 |
| 8×8×2 in grilling plate | 203×203×51 mm | 4.5 kg | $13.00 | $11.20 | $10.10 | $9.50 |
| 12×8×1.5 in serving slab | 305×203×38 mm | 5.0 kg | $14.50 | $12.60 | $11.30 | $10.50 |
| Mortar & pestle | ~127 mm | 2.6 kg | $19.00 | $16.80 | $15.20 | $14.00 |
| 12×12×2 in grill block | 305×305×51 mm | 10.2 kg | $22.00 | $19.40 | $17.50 | $16.00 |
| Custom cut | To drawing | Calculated | — | Quoted | Quoted | Quoted |
A grade only on every piece, bevelled and polished edges, tight colour matching, printed sleeves or gift boxes, wooden trivets or stainless holders, barcodes, custom dimensions, small split quantities.
Mixed A and B against a stated use split, raw sawn edges, accepting natural colour variation, brown master cartons, standard sizes, full containers and a schedule we can plan the saw line around.
Volume breaks across every line, payment terms and a worked landed-cost example are on the wholesale pricing page. MOQ on this category is 20 pieces, mixed however you like.
Veins are pretty, and veins are where it breaks
Seam material comes out in two broad conditions. Tight, largely single-crystal rock, translucent when you hold a thin edge to a light, with an even orange-pink through the body. And veined rock, banded with white or dark lines of clay, iron oxide and other seam minerals.
The veined pieces are the good-looking ones. Buyers pick them out of a sample box every time. They are also the weaker ones, because a vein is a discontinuity, and under thermal stress a discontinuity is a fault line waiting for a reason. Dark inclusions behave the same way, and they also heat at a different rate from the surrounding halite, which makes it worse.
So we grade, and we tell you which grade is going where.
A grade
Tight crystal, minimal veining, no inclusion crossing a full face, no dull note on the tap test. Direct heat, grilling plates, anything a customer will put on a burner. Roughly 55 to 65 per cent of good production depending on the seam we are working.
B grade
Visible veining, banding or inclusions, sound on the tap test. Serving, chilling, charcuterie, cheese boards, display and wall use. Sold at a small discount and frequently the better seller on a shelf, because it looks like rock rather than like plastic.
Colour and edges
Colour runs from pale peach to deep orange-red and it varies within one block, let alone across a pallet. We can sort tighter for a colour-matched retail set, at a surcharge, and there is a limit to how tight anyone can hold it honestly. Edges are supplied bevelled and polished as standard on serving pieces, raw sawn on grilling blocks and cladding tiles unless you specify otherwise. A bevelled edge chips less in transit; a raw edge reads as more authentic. Pick one and stay with it, because customers notice a mixed carton.
Tell us the use split say 60% grilling, 40% serving and we will grade to it. Buyers who order "mixed" and then complain about veins in their grilling stock are describing an ordering problem, not a quality problem.
Print these five things or accept the returns
We supply a printed care leaflet in every carton as standard, at no charge, in English. We will print your own version instead, or a translated one, from the first order there is no separate minimum for the leaflet if you are already running printed sleeves.
Whatever it says, it needs to carry these:
1. The heating method, in steps
Low 15 minutes, medium 15 minutes, high 15 minutes, then cook. Cool on the switched-off burner for two hours or more. Never start on high.
2. Not dishwasher safe
Set it in bold, near the top, not buried at the end of a paragraph. Scrape when cool with a plastic or wooden scraper, wipe with a barely damp cloth, dry it. No soap, no soaking, no running water.
3. Never heat a wet block
Give it a drying time in hours, not a vague instruction. Twenty-four hours between wash and next use is the sensible line for a two-inch block.
4. Expected lifespan, stated honestly
Wording along the lines of: this is a natural mineral that thins with use and will eventually crack. With correct heating, expect dozens of uses. Cracking at the end of that life is normal and is not a manufacturing fault. Buyers flinch at that sentence, then discover it is the cheapest returns reduction available to them.
5. Not for glass-top stoves
A heavy salt block on a ceramic glass cooktop risks scratching the surface, trapping heat under the block and, at the extreme, cracking the cooktop. That is a claim against your customer's kitchen, not against a $12 block. Gas burner, charcoal or gas grill, or oven only.
The most expensive complaint in this category by a wide margin, and the easiest to prevent with one line of print. Put it on the sleeve and the leaflet, not just the leaflet.
Dense, flat, brittle: a harder freight problem than lamps
Blocks do not break by crushing. They break by hitting each other. Every packing decision below exists to stop two pieces of rock salt touching.
| Item | Pcs / master carton | Carton gross | Cartons / pallet | Pcs / 20ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6×6×0.75 in tile | 24 | ~24 kg | 32 | ~20,000 |
| 8×4×1 in tile | 18 | ~21 kg | 36 | ~18,000 |
| Shot glasses (sets) | 12 sets | ~9 kg | 48 | ~35,000 sets |
| Bowl, 5 in | 6 | ~8.5 kg | 44 | ~17,500 |
| 8×8×2 in plate | 4 | ~19 kg | 40 | ~4,800 |
| 12×8×1.5 in slab | 4 | ~21 kg | 36 | ~4,300 |
| Mortar & pestle | 4 | ~11.5 kg | 44 | ~8,300 |
| 12×12×2 in block | 2 | ~21.5 kg | 36 | ~2,150 |
Carton specification
Each block is bubble-wrapped twice and corner-protected with moulded EPE foam, then seated in a die-cut fitment so it cannot slide. Master cartons are double-wall 5-ply, minimum 200 lb burst test on the block sizes heavier than we use for lamps, because the contents are the thing doing the damage. Cartons are kept under 25 kg gross so a warehouse worker can lift one without an incident report.
Palletisation
Palletised as standard, wrapped and strapped, corner boards on every stack, airbags in the voids. Pallet gross is capped at about 800 kg because dense cargo on a lightly built pallet is how the bottom row gets crushed. We will floor-load on written request. On this product we would rather not.
Breakage, and who pays
We target under 2% breakage on a full container and credit anything above 3%, against photographs of the pieces alongside the carton they arrived in. Those are worse numbers than we quote on lamps, and quoting better ones on a dense brittle mineral would be dishonest.
Why sea beats air here
Counter-intuitive, but consistent. Air freight subjects a pallet to repeated hard set-downs, ULD build and break, and a lot of individual handling. A sea container is packed once, moved slowly by crane and stays sealed. We see materially higher block breakage on air shipments than on sea, and the freight cost on a 10 kg piece makes air uneconomic anyway. Use air for samples only.
Blocks are weight-limited, never cube-limited. At roughly 24–25 MT of cargo, a 20ft container of 8×8×2 plates is around half full by volume and completely full by payload. Book by weight and check your destination road limits before you commit to a 40ft.
The same tile sells twice: kitchen and sauna
The 8×4×1 in tile is a kitchen place-setting piece and a sauna cladding piece depending on who you sell it to, and it is worth knowing that before you set your buy quantity. Backlit salt walls in spas, saunas, salt rooms and increasingly in restaurant interiors run on tiles and bricks of exactly this kind of material, usually B grade, because veining looks better with a light behind it.
Two practical differences. Wall and sauna work needs consistent thickness far more than kitchen work does, since the installer is bedding tiles against a flat plane we tighten the thickness tolerance to ±1 mm for cladding orders and it costs a little more. And cladding buyers order by the square metre, not by the piece, so send us your wall area and we will convert it, including a 10% wastage allowance that installers always need and rarely ask for.
Bricks, backlit panel systems, adhesive specification and salt room build detail sit on their own page.
Salt bricks & halotherapy panels →
Salt and steam do not mix well. Tiles belong in a dry sauna or a lit wall, not in a steam room, and any wall in a humid environment needs drainage detail behind it. Get that wrong and the wall weeps onto the floor.
Block questions buyers ask before the first order
Thermal shock and internal fissures, and the two compound each other. Salt conducts heat badly, so a block put straight onto high heat builds a steep gradient between its hot face and cold core and relieves the stress by splitting. An existing internal fissure gives that split somewhere to start. Slow three-stage heating deals with most of the first cause; tap-testing at our end deals with most of the second.
Dozens of uses on a well-treated 8×8×2 plate, then it breaks. Every block thins, erodes and eventually fails that is the product, not a defect. Print a use range rather than implying permanence and your return rate drops sharply.
No, and it needs to be in bold on your packaging. One cycle dissolves a serious part of the block. Scrape it cool with a plastic or wooden scraper, wipe with a barely damp cloth, dry it. No soap, no soaking, no running water.
1.5 in is the practical minimum for direct heat and 2 in is what we recommend. Under 1.5 in the block cannot hold a survivable gradient and cracks far faster. Thin tiles are excellent serving and chilling pieces label them that way.
A grade is tight, largely single-crystal material with minimal veining and no inclusion crossing a face that is what goes on a burner. B grade has visible veins, banding or dark inclusions, which are natural fault lines, so it is sold for serving, chilling and display only. Same mineral, same seam; the difference is crystal structure, not purity.
At roughly 24–25 MT of cargo: about 4,800 of the 8×8×2 plate, 4,300 of the 12×8×1.5 slab, 2,150 of the 12×12×2 block, or around 20,000 of the 6×6×0.75 tile. You hit payload with the container roughly half full.
Under 2% is our target on a full container, with a credit above 3% against photographs of the pieces and the carton they came in. Sea freight breaks fewer blocks than air does, because a container is packed once and handled slowly while an air pallet is built, broken and set down repeatedly.
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.