The first conversation with a chain feels like a larger version of something you already know how to do, and it is not. An importer buys goods; a chain admits a supplier. The order, if it comes, arrives at the end of an admission procedure with its own file, its own calendar and its own vocabulary — and most of that procedure happens before anyone discusses a price.
What a chain asks that an importer never asked
The questions are not suspicion, and they are not bureaucracy for its own sake. A chain puts its own name on the shelf above your product; if something goes wrong, the customer blames the sign on the building, not the factory. Everything in the supplier file is a transfer of responsibility written down in advance, and an exporter who reads it that way answers faster than one who experiences it as an obstacle course.
- A supplier file. Legal identity, ownership, bank details, insurance certificates, the sites where production actually happens, and a named person for quality and for logistics. It is rebuilt every year, and one missing item stalls the whole listing.
- A social audit, read for its findings. Not a logo: a report produced under a recognised method, on a dated visit, with findings and a corrective plan. A buyer who knows the subject reads the findings and what was done about them, and mistrusts a report that contains none.
- Traceability down to the batch. Which materials, from which supplier, in which production batch, loaded in which carton. The question is asked once, calmly, and it only ever matters on the day something is wrong.
- Product liability insurance that works here. A policy covering the European market, at a level the chain sets, with the chain named where its contract requires it. A certificate issued for another territory is paperwork, not cover.
- A recall procedure you could actually execute. Who decides, who is called, how quickly you can say which batches went where, and who pays for the withdrawal. Being asked this is not pessimism; it is the condition of being on a shelf.
- Logistics conformity. Labels, pallet patterns, electronic ordering and invoicing, booked delivery windows. It looks like detail, and it is exactly where the deductions live.
The calendar belongs to them
A chain does not buy when you are ready. It reviews a category on its own cycle — a range review for each family of products, at a moment fixed long in advance — and decides what the shelf will hold until the next one. Arriving outside that window means waiting for it, whatever the quality of the offer. The decision itself is rarely one person's: a buyer builds a recommendation and a committee arbitrates between families, suppliers and the chain's own brand.
Which turns the useful question in a first meeting into something very concrete: when is the next review for this category, and what must the file contain by then? A buyer will answer that question willingly, because it costs them nothing and it filters out the suppliers who were not going to make the date. The answer also tells you whether you are in a conversation or in a courtesy visit.
Your brand, or theirs
| Your own brand | Their private label | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides the product | You do, within what the buyer will accept | They do, from a brief you answer |
| What the shelf teaches the customer | Your name, which travels to your other channels | Their name — your existence is not visible to anyone |
| What the price conversation is about | What the product is worth on the shelf | Your cost, which they will eventually ask to see |
| What ends it | A range review that goes against you | A cheaper answer to the same brief |
| What you are left with afterwards | A name some customers recognise, and other channels | A line that ran well, and an industrial reference you can use |
Somewhere in the conversation the question arrives — would you make this for us, under our name? — and it sounds like the same business with a different label on the box. It is a different business, and neither column is the right answer. Private label fills a line, teaches you what a European chain demands industrially, and pays for the compliance work you needed anyway. It also makes you interchangeable, because nothing the customer sees belongs to you. Your own brand keeps the relationship and costs years of patience. The mistake is not choosing one; it is accepting a private label volume so large that your own name never gets the investment, and then discovering that the volume moved.
Service penalties are part of the price
A chain's contract sets service levels and attaches a deduction to each one: the share of the order actually delivered, respect of the booked window, conformity of the labels and the pallet, the electronic documents. These are not negotiating tactics. An empty shelf on a Saturday costs the chain a sale it cannot recover, and the deduction is how that cost is shared. They apply whether or not the cause was yours.
That last sentence is where a supplier shipping from China gets caught. The ship was late, the customs clearance took longer than usual, the warehouse mis-stacked a pallet: none of it is an excuse the contract recognises. The penalty regime therefore has to be read before you quote, and translated into your own supply chain — stock held on the continent rather than on the water, a buffer in the lead time you promise, and someone who can answer in the chain's working hours. A price built on a perfect voyage is a price you will give back in deductions.
Ask for the supplier file and the service schedule before you quote, not after the buyer says yes. They contain the real cost of the contract — the audit, the insurance, the stock you will have to hold, the deductions you will absorb — and a price given without having read them is not a price, it is an opening position you will have to defend for years.
Where to read it yourself
Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.