Wholesale Handler
Selling to another business makes you a juice processor
FDA's juice HACCP regulation, 21 CFR 120, binds every juice processor except a retail establishment, and a retail establishment is one that supplies juice directly to consumers and does not sell or distribute juice to other business entities. The exemption is all-or-nothing. Distribute any juice to any business and every juice product the operation makes falls under part 120.
Under 21 CFR 120.24 the HACCP plan has to carry control measures achieving at minimum a 5-log reduction of the pertinent microorganism, held for a period at least as long as the shelf life of the product under normal and moderate abuse conditions. The pertinent pathogen is set per juice - E. coli O157:H7 for apple, Salmonella for citrus. The rule has been in force since January 2001 and its last compliance date passed in January 2004, so size is no exemption: FDA dropped the proposed carve-out for very small retailers during rulemaking. The warning statement on an untreated bottle is not an alternative to compliance, and FDA says so in its own questions and answers on the regulation.
So there are two businesses here, not one. A juicery pressing raw and selling across its own counter can sell untreated juice with that warning on the label. A juicery supplying a cafe, a gym, an office or a deli is a processor, and everything it presses runs under a validated 5-log process.
Treatment sets the shelf life, and the shelf life sets the cutoff
High pressure processing is the usual route for a cold-press producer, because it reaches the 5-log without heat. FDA accepts it alongside thermal pasteurisation, ultraviolet light and pulsed light. It does not make juice shelf stable - spores survive the pressure, so the cold chain runs the whole life of the bottle.
How many days it buys is reported differently by different sources, and the processors are the ones to believe over the retail write-ups. Hiperbaric, which builds the vessels, reports orange juice at 600 MPa holding its microbial count steady for 30 days and labelled to 60 days at 4°C, and Evolution Fresh moving from three to five days up to 55 and beyond. Universal Pure, which runs the pressure as a service, puts the microbiological ceiling for a high-acid juice above a year while the date printed on the label sits at 90 to 120 days, held down by enzyme activity and packaging rather than by pathogens. Retail-side articles putting HPP at about 30 days are the low outlier.
Treatment also puts a second deadline in front of the first. A pressure run has to be booked, and Universal Pure's own floor is 20,000 bottles per run, so the order book feeding a run closes against a date weeks out rather than against a van loading at 4am. Wholesale Handler holds a cutoff per delivery day and no production-run calendar, so a toll booking is tracked outside it.
Attaching the cutoff to the delivery day
Published juice terms cluster at 24 to 48 hours. One Colorado producer closes Tuesday at 10am for a Wednesday afternoon drop; a North Carolina producer presses every Thursday with last call at noon on the Wednesday; a California producer closes at the end of Saturday for a Monday round. Each of those is a rule about a delivery day rather than about the business.
In Wholesale Handler every accepted delivery day carries its own cutoff, stored as minutes before the start of that day in the merchant's timezone, and a delivery day cannot exist without one. The offset is signed, so a negative value puts the deadline inside the delivery day itself and allows same-day ordering. A Saturday run can close Friday lunchtime while a Monday run stays open until Sunday evening.
Delivery days, the cutoff, the booking horizon, the delivery charge and the minimum spend sit together on an order profile, and each customer is assigned one - so a city round and an outlying round are two profiles rather than two sets of customer records. When a delivery date is closed, the buyer is told which rule closed it: the four reasons are a non-delivery day, a holiday or closure, a cutoff that has passed, and a date beyond the booking horizon. On top of that the merchant writes their own line, shown on a locked order - "ring the unit if Thursday needs another case". How to stop wholesale customers ordering after the cutoff covers what happens at the boundary.
The merchant is not held to those rules. Placing an order on a customer's behalf, the merchant can pick any delivery date, go below the minimum spend, and leave stock untouched where the goods have already gone out, and every rule set aside is named back at the review step. That covers the 7am call from a cafe that sold out, without reopening the cutoff for the whole book.
What a standing order has to survive
Most juice accounts repeat the same quantity week after week, so Wholesale Handler writes the order instead of waiting for the buyer to. A standing order runs weekly, two-weekly, three-weekly or four-weekly from a start date, and each delivery's order is created automatically at that delivery day's cutoff. No order exists before then, which is why skipping a delivery stops an order being created rather than cancelling one. What is a standing order in wholesale covers how the pattern differs from a repeat order, and how to manage standing orders for weekly wholesale delivery covers running one week to week.
Three days before each delivery the customer is sent a preview email carrying the lines at today's prices, with a skip link that needs no sign-in. A customer who does nothing with it gets the order placed at the cutoff as usual.
Because the order is written at the cutoff rather than when the schedule was saved, every line is priced and checked again at that moment:
- A product out of season, or inside an unavailability window, is left off the order. The customer is emailed which line went and when it comes back, where that date is known.
- A delivery whose total falls below the profile's minimum spend does not place at all. The schedule stops with a Needs attention status naming both figures, and both parties are emailed.
- A delivery falling on a date the juicery has closed does not place. The customer hears as soon as the closure is saved rather than on the day, is sent the delivery days their profile allows either side of it, and choosing one opens an order already holding that schedule's items.
For a producer whose citrus moves in and out of season, that re-check at the cutoff is what stops a Monday standing order asking for a blend nobody can press on Monday.
Pressing against a list that says whether it is final
Every order for a delivery date collapses into one total per product, alongside the number of orders that total came from. That total is the press quantity for the day. Each day is also marked open or closed for orders, and a day reads closed only when no order profile can still take an order for it, so one round still open leaves the totals able to move. Pressing against a day marked open is pressing against a number that can still change.
A day opens into per-customer lines for packing beside the totals for making, with a private note per date. The production sheet prints as quantity by product with a tick box per line. Packing slips print the customer, the delivery date and each line's name, SKU, pack unit and quantity, and carry no prices.
Stock counting is set per product. A juice left untracked can be ordered in any quantity, which is the setting that fits anything pressed to order; a tracked product that reaches zero stops being orderable until it is restocked. Untracked products read "Not tracked" rather than "unlimited", which would claim something about supply the merchant has not stated.
Cafes, gyms, offices and delis order on different clocks
One New Jersey juice wholesaler publishes the spread across its own book: coffee shops average two deliveries a month, hotels reorder weekly, and a grocery account takes around a hundred juices that last it about three weeks. A gym selling from a front-of-house fridge and an office taking a standing case for Monday morning are two more cadences again.
One cutoff across the whole book cannot hold that spread, which is what order profiles are for. Minimum spend and delivery charge sit on the profile beside the delivery days, and a profile can waive the delivery charge once the minimum spend is met, so a weekly gym round and a monthly deli drop can carry different commercial terms without duplicating products or price lists. Holidays and closures are set once for the whole business, which is what shuts the week between Christmas and New Year across every account at the same time.
What Wholesale Handler does not hold
- No batch or lot code, no press date, no best-by date, and no traceability from an order line back to a pressing or a pressure run. Product-level stock counts and dated availability windows are held; which batch a bottle came from is not, and nor is a cold-chain temperature.
- No fixed multiples. A product carries a unit label and a pack size, and that pack size is a label with no arithmetic behind it, so a published rule like "24 bottles, minimum three per flavour" is not enforced on the order form. The minimum that is enforced is a money amount rather than a bottle count. Units of sale and pack sizes are next up on the roadmap.
- No production-run calendar. A cutoff attaches to a delivery day, so a pressure run's own booking date has no record of its own.
- No routing, no driver app and no proof of delivery. Orders produce packing slips and a production sheet; sequencing the van is a separate job.
- No deposit or returnable-container balance. A bottle deposit can be sold as a product line, but bottles sitting out with an account are not held as a balance against it.
