Tissue manufacturers in Europe

The two Europes of tissue

European tissue splits into two industries that happen to share a raw material. The first is the integrated giants: Essity, Sofidel, WEPA, Metsä Tissue, Lucart, ICT and their peers. They own paper machines, they sell their own brands, and they run private label contracts for the continent's supermarket chains. The second industry is the converting tier: mills and converters that buy or make parent rolls and turn them into finished product for whoever brings a credible order.

The confusion between the two costs buyers months. If you bring a four container programme to a group built around retail contracts many times that size, you will get a polite reply or a price built to make you go away. The converting tier is where mid size own brand programmes actually get made.

What the converting tier looks like

Across Italy, Iberia, Turkey, Poland and the Balkans sits a network of converters that live on exactly this work. They run the same class of converting lines as the majors, hold the same certifications where the buyer demands them, and will run your label at volumes a supermarket buyer would consider a rounding error. The trade is that you take on more of the specification work yourself. A retail giant hands its supplier a forty page spec book. You will hand your converter one page, and everything you leave off that page becomes the converter's choice, made in the converter's interest.

The one page that protects you

Whatever the product, the specification that keeps a programme honest fits on a single sheet:

• Ply and grammage, stated per ply.
• Sheet count or roll length, and sheet size, in millimetres.
• Core diameter, because the dispenser installed on your customer's wall decides it.
• Units per case, case dimensions, and cases per pallet if you palletise to a fixed pattern.
• Pulp basis: virgin, recycled, or a stated mix, with certification named if your market asks for it.
• Emboss and lamination, or the word plain.

Send that page with a photograph of the case you buy today and a competent converter in Europe has everything needed to quote it.

Reading a European quotation

Three habits save money. First, insist the quotation states the container loading, in cases, because tissue cubes out and the loading number is the real price. Second, ask whether the price holds for a second production run or was built on a spot parent roll position. Third, check the Incoterm does the work you think it does: an ex works price from an inland converter can carry more pre carriage than the sea freight itself.

Where Millgate fits

Millgate runs own brand hygiene paper and cleaning chemical programs on European production for distributors in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. Paper runs at one mill, chemicals at a second plant, and both are consolidated into one container with one set of documents and one invoice from a US company. If the converting tier is where your programme belongs, we are the desk that runs it for you. Send us the one page specification above, filled in, and we will price it.