In this paper, we present a survey on vehicle routing problems with multiple commodities. In most routing problems, only one commodity is explicitly considered. This may be due to the fact that, indeed, a single commodity is involved, or multiple commodities are transported, but they are aggregated and modeled as a single commodity, as no specific requirement imposes their explicit consideration. However, there exist cases in which this aggregation is not possible due to the characteristics of the commodities or to the fact that it would lead to sub-optimal routing plans. This survey focuses on the analysis of the settings of the problems and the features of the commodities that require explicit consideration of disaggregated commodities in routing problems. We show that problem settings are inherently different with respect to the single commodity problems, and this has a consequence on both models and solution approaches, which cannot be straightforwardly adapted from the single commodity cases. We propose a classification of the routing problems with multiple commodities and discuss the motivations that force considering the presence of multiple commodities explicitly. Specifically, we focus on the modeling perspective by proposing a general formulation for routing problems with multiple commodities and showing how this formulation can be adapted to the different features that characterize the problem classes discussed in the survey. Also, 1 for each major class of problems, promising future research directions are discussed by analysing what has been studied in the current literature and focusing on challenging topics not covered yet.