Founding membership
How the depot, shipping and compliance work.
The short version lives on the PPWR page. This is the mechanism behind it.
One depot, stock you still own
Members ship stock to a single Council depot. It sits there on consignment: the producer keeps ownership of it right up until a bottle actually sells. The depot is not a warehouse you rent space in and hope to fill. You send stock in, and only pay for the time it actually sits there.
Three ways a bottle sells
Through Republic of Heat’s own shop. ROH lists depot stock directly and ships it, working toward being the EU-wide shopfront for independent hot sauce.
Through your own website. You keep your own storefront and customer relationship. Checkout, invoicing and payment for international orders run through a ROH-branded portal behind the scenes, which is what makes the compliance side work: one registered seller handling the parts that actually require registration, while you keep the brand. Sales within your own country are unaffected and never touch this portal at all.
Through Council wholesale. The same pooled stock supplies direct B2B orders to trade buyers.
Every outbound box is Republic of Heat branded, regardless of which of the three it came through. Payment for stock sold goes back to the producer either way.
One registration, not twenty-seven
Republic of Heat is the registered producer of record for stock held at the depot. That is the whole point of pooling it: one entity carries the registration, and the authorised representative work, in each market members actually sell into, instead of every maker separately finding, paying and managing their own representative in every country they ship to. See the PPWR page for what that obligation actually requires and what it costs to do alone.
Pooled shipping, both directions
Sending one pallet costs less per bottle than sending thirty parcels. That applies inbound, when members ship stock to the depot, and outbound, including stock going to events rather than direct to a customer. Pooling volume across members is what gets the rate down; a single producer shipping alone never reaches it.
What storage costs, and what is still open
Storage is quoted per bottle per year, at €0.70. Stock sits on the shelf in cartons, and the membership terms set out how part-full cartons are billed, in writing, before anyone pays. The figures for fulfilment and country coverage are being confirmed with compliance and logistics providers directly rather than published as placeholders. Founding members get those numbers, and a say in them, as they are set.