Margin math for a charcoal brand: distributor, retail and online channels
By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert ·
The direct answer
We do not publish margin bands for your channel, and we are not going to. What a distributor, a lounge or an online store makes on a box depends on a landed cost we do not control and a shelf price we never see. A band typed here would be a guess wearing the clothes of a fact, and you would build a business plan on it.
What we can give you is the half of the chain that is ours and exact: the price per kilogram leaving our factory. Everything after that is arithmetic you can do with your own quotes — and this page sets out how to do it, using dated conventions from industries that publish theirs, each cited as its own industry's number rather than as charcoal's.
The one side we can state exactly
Our grid runs from 1.65 to 1.90 USD per kilogram in boxes, FOB Tanjung Priok, September 2026, reviewed monthly. That is the number every channel calculation starts from, and it is the only one on this page that is ours.
| Grade | USD per kg, boxed | USD per kg, bulk |
|---|---|---|
| Diamond | 1.90 | 1.82 |
| Platinum | 1.80 | 1.72 |
| Super Premium | 1.75 | 1.67 |
| Premium | 1.70 | 1.62 |
| Regular | 1.65 | 1.57 |
Those are the same figures the branding cost page works in tonnes, divided by a thousand. The gap between the two columns is the packaging line, and it is the same on every grade — the fully costed container shows where it lands on a real load.
The channel comparison, as a cost stack
A margin band tells you nothing without the stack underneath it. Build the stack instead: every row below is either ours, or a number you already have from a quote, or a decision you are about to make. Fill the middle column from your own paperwork and the answer falls out of the arithmetic rather than out of somebody's average.
| Line | Where the number comes from | Worked example, one 1 kg box |
|---|---|---|
| Ex-factory, per kg | Ours — the grid above, FOB Tanjung Priok | 1.70 (Premium, boxed) |
| Ocean freight and surcharges, per kg | Your forwarder's quote, divided by the payload | 0.09 — assumption, not our figure |
| Duty, VAT and clearance | Your destination — start from the country import guides | Left empty on purpose |
| = Landed cost, per kg | The sum of the rows above | 1.79 before duty |
| Your margin | Your decision — see the arithmetic below | Yours to set |
| Distributor's margin | Negotiated; benchmark by the conventions below | Negotiated |
| Retailer's margin | Set by the channel, rarely by you | Set by the channel |
| = Shelf price | What the stack adds up to | The output, not an input |
Two rows in that table are deliberately empty, and they are the two that decide the answer. The freight figure is an assumption we wrote in so the arithmetic has something to run on — it is not our quote and not a market rate. The duty row stays blank because it depends on a country we do not choose and a classification your broker files.
What other industries publish
Charcoal does not publish channel bands. Adjacent industries do, and their numbers are useful as shapes — where the money goes and in what order — rather than as figures to apply to a box of coals. Every row names its industry and its date, because a benchmark without either is folklore.
| Convention | Whose industry | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Retailers take roughly 25–30 % of shelf price | Consumer packaged goods | Eightx, finance blog, 9 June 2026 — the page labels its own waterfall illustrative |
| A national distributor may run about 13 % gross margin on what it resells | Consumer packaged goods | Eightx, finance blog, 9 June 2026 |
| Distributor margins range 3–30 %, set by channel cost and risk rather than by a standard number | Cross-industry distribution | Alliance Experts, consultancy, 1 July 2026 — "negotiation benchmarks, not fixed rules" |
| Manufacturer-to-distributor markup 15–20 %; distributors then add 20–40 % | Cross-industry distribution | Vendavo, pricing-software vendor, 26 November 2024 |
| Trade spend can consume 15–25 % of gross wholesale revenue | Consumer packaged goods | Eightx, finance blog, 9 June 2026 |
| Listing and slotting fees sit on top of the retail margin, not inside it | Grocery and CPG retail | Alliance Experts, consultancy, 1 July 2026 |
None of those is a charcoal number and none of them is ours. The most useful line in the table is the one that refuses to give a figure at all: margins are earned by activities and risks, so listing what each party actually does — holding stock, extending credit, delivering, taking returns — is a better basis for a negotiation than a percentage copied from a blog.
Building your own margin model
One piece of arithmetic catches more first-time brand owners than any other, and it is worth spelling out because it is the difference between a plan that works and one that is out by a third. Markup and margin are not the same number. A 50 % markup on cost is a 33 % margin on the selling price — the same money, two denominators. Quote a distributor a "40 % margin" when you meant a 40 % markup and you have given away roughly a third more than you intended, on every case, for the life of the agreement.
Then work the stack from both ends. From the bottom: your landed cost is fixed by the grid above plus your freight and duty, and it is the floor. From the top: the shelf price is whatever your channel will bear, and you do not set it. The margin is what is left in between, divided among however many parties are in the chain — which is the real argument for keeping that chain short, and the reason so many brands go direct before they go wide.
Everything above assumes a container's worth of one design. How many designs fit in one container is what decides whether your lineup is one SKU with good economics or five with thin ones, and it moves this arithmetic more than any percentage on this page.
Sanity-check your stack with us
Send the grade, the format and the destination, and the export desk will confirm the ex-factory half exactly — the part we can be precise about. What you do with the rest of the stack is your business, and we would rather help you build it than hand you a band.