Tissue is designed to absorb moisture. That is the entire point of it. The inconvenient consequence is that it does not wait until someone uses it, and a roll sitting in a damp store is quietly doing its job on the air around it.
In a climate like ours this is not a theoretical problem. It is the difference between stock that performs as specified and stock that disappoints the customer who bought it, and almost nobody connects the complaint back to the storeroom.
What damp actually does to it
- It gets heavier and limper. Absorbed moisture softens the structure. The sheet loses the strength you paid for, tears in use, and people take more of it.
- It absorbs less. Paper that has already taken on moisture has less capacity left for the job you bought it for.
- It can grow mould. Given warmth, still air and time, this ends with stock you cannot sell and should not use.
- It takes on smell. This one surprises people. Paper is an excellent sponge for odour, so tissue stored near fuel, paint, soap or cleaning chemicals will carry that smell to the customer.
- Wrappers sweat and labels lift. Even where the paper survives, the pack can look second hand, and a shopper reads that as old stock.
The rules that do most of the work
- Get it off the floor. Pallets, always. A concrete floor moves moisture upward, and the bottom carton takes it first. This single habit prevents most damage.
- Get it off exterior walls. Leave a gap. Outside walls sweat, and the cartons touching them are the ones you will write off.
- Keep air moving. Still air in a warm room is what mould waits for. Ventilation costs nothing and does more than most interventions.
- Fix the roof before the rains. Obvious, routinely ignored, and the cause of most total losses. One leak above a stack ruins the whole column, not one carton.
- Store it away from chemicals. Not the same room as fuel, paint, detergent or soap. Odour transfer is permanent and there is no fixing it afterwards.
- Do not strip the wrapper early. The wrap is doing real work. Opening cases in advance to look tidy on the shelf is removing the protection you paid for.
- Rotate properly. First in, first out. Tissue has no dramatic expiry, but a carton that sits at the back for a year in this climate is not the product that arrived.
- Do not stack to the ceiling. Crushed cartons at the bottom deform the rolls inside, and a deformed roll jams a dispenser.
Loading and unloading in the rain
Most damage happens in the twenty minutes between the truck and the door. A carton that gets soaked during offloading looks fine once the outside dries, and nobody flags it. It goes into the stack and reappears as a customer complaint two months later.
Have a covered receiving point, even an improvised one. If a delivery arrives in heavy rain and there is no cover, it is entirely reasonable to ask the driver to wait.
Nobody writes off a carton that got wet during offloading. They write off the customer who bought it three months later.
How to spot stock that has gone off
- The carton feels heavier than it should.
- The roll feels soft or spongy rather than firm.
- Any musty smell at all. Trust your nose, it is more sensitive than any test you have on site.
- Wrapper cloudy on the inside, which means condensation has been cycling.
- Staining on the bottom carton of a stack, which means the floor won.
- Any visible spotting. That stock is finished. Do not sell it and do not put it in a washroom.
Do a walk before each rainy season
Ten minutes, twice a year. Look up at the roof, look at the bottom cartons, put your hand on the wall behind the stack, and smell the room. Then move whatever is at risk. It is the cheapest inventory protection available to you and it needs no budget approval.
If you want help working out how much stock you should be holding in the first place, so that less of it sits long enough to be at risk, try the Order Planner or talk to our team.