Two Swedish enquiries in one week asked for dried fruit in retail bags of roughly two hundred to five hundred grams. It is the format a specialty shop is used to for apricots, figs and raisins, and it is not the format fruit crisps come in. The difference is not a supplier's preference; it comes from what each product physically is, and it is worth explaining before a first order is planned.
Weight, volume and the crisp
Take an apple, slice it thin, dry it at low temperature until it is crunchy, and you have removed most of its weight and almost none of its size. A fruit crisp is light for its volume. A pack that looks generous weighs little, and a retail pack of around fifty grams is a full single serving of crisps — the pack our own production comes in.
Classic dried fruit is the opposite case. An apricot half or a fig keeps a good part of its moisture and its density; a bag in the low hundreds of grams is a modest handful. Selling crisps in a five-hundred-gram bag would produce a pack the size of a pillow and a price per unit no shelf would carry; selling apricots in fifty-gram packs would look mean. The pack size follows the product.
Two purchase occasions
The formats also serve different moments in a shop. Crisps behave like a snack: an impulse purchase, a lunchbox item, a gift-basket filler, placed near the till or on a snack shelf. Classic dried fruit behaves like a pantry item: bought to keep, in a larger bag, on the grocery shelf.
A specialty shop can carry both, and many do. The workable way to plan it is as two lines of one range — each with its own pack, its own label and its own quantity — rather than one order in one pack size.
