Why the 500ml Can Belongs in Your Next Export Container

Single-serve soft drinks have been moving in one direction for two years: away from the small can, and towards a bigger one. The 500ml can is now the fastest-growing single can size in sparkling soft drinks, and the reason is not complicated. Younger shoppers prefer a can to a bottle — it looks better in the hand, it chills faster, it feels like a premium buy — but 330ml is not enough liquid for the occasion they are buying it for. Until recently there was nothing in between.

Coca-Cola closed that gap with the Superfan Edition 500ml can. We hold all three of them.

What we carry today

• Coca-Cola Original Taste — Superfan Edition 500ml can, cases of 12
• Coca-Cola Zero Sugar — Superfan Edition 500ml can, cases of 12
• Diet Coke — Superfan Edition 500ml can, cases of 12

Original Taste is on the shop now, with its current period price, last order date and case configuration on the line. Zero Sugar and Diet run the same 12-case configuration — send us your quantities and we will price them onto the same order. The wider 500ml range — Coke Zero Cherry, Zero Lime, Cherry, Diet Cherry and the rest — sits alongside them in bottle.

Why a can travels better than a bottle

This is the part a UK retailer never has to think about and an importer always does.

• It arrives intact. A can holds its own shape under a full pallet and six weeks at sea. Plastic creases, panels dent, and a bottle with a crushed shoulder is a unit your customer will not put on a shelf.
• It stacks denser. Straight-sided cans use the pallet footprint far more efficiently than a contoured bottle, so more saleable units ride in the same cubic metre — and freight is charged on the space, not on the drink.
• It is opaque. No light reaches the liquid, which matters a great deal more on a route through the Gulf or East Africa than it does in a chilled aisle in Birmingham.
• It seals under pressure. No cap to work loose in transit, and nothing to leak into the case below.

Add the format — don't swap for it

The mistake we see most often is treating the 500ml can as a replacement for something already on the list. It is not. Each pack is doing a different job:

• 330ml can is the entry price point. It recruits on affordability and impulse.
• 500ml bottle is the frequency pack — the regular, drink-now, on-the-go size.
• 500ml can is the recruitment pack. It brings in the younger shopper who was not buying either of the other two.

Drop one to make room for another and you move the same volume between three lines. Range all three and you add transactions, because the shopper buying the can was not buying the bottle instead. If space is genuinely tight, take it from somewhere else in the fixture rather than from your own cola.

Getting it on the container

The 500ml cans go on the same order as everything else you buy from us: add them by the layer or the pallet, and they consolidate into one container, one invoice and one set of export documents alongside your confectionery, your grocery and everything else on the list.

Case and pallet configuration is stated on every line in the shop, so you can see what a layer does to your cube before you commit to it, and the order builder will tell you how full the container is as you go.

Sign in to see your prices, or send us your list and we will price it and come back the same working day.