About
We run your channel in Southeast Asia
We build and operate the Southeast Asian sales channel for Canadian food, beverage and consumer-product companies: choosing the market, holding the registration, qualifying and negotiating the distributor, and staying accountable for the channel once it is running.
Why this works
Canadians at both ends of the trade
Most firms selling ASEAN market entry sit on one side of the ocean. A Canadian consultancy understands your SFCR licence, your CFIA certificate and your production calendar, and then emails a distributor in Ho Chi Minh City and waits. An agency in Singapore or Bangkok knows the buyers and has never seen a Canadian export file, so it cannot tell you whether the plant can actually be certified for the market it is pitching you into.
Both halves are necessary and neither is sufficient. We are Canadians in Canada and Canadians in Southeast Asia, working the same file from both ends: one side reading your specification, your establishment approval and your origin position, the other sitting across a table from the distributor who would carry it.
That is also why the answers on this site are specific. A question about who may hold your product registration in Vietnam, or whether a halal certificate issued in Canada is recognised in Malaysia, is not a question you can settle from one time zone.
What proximity changes
The parts of this job that cannot be done remotely
01
Qualifying a distributor
A contact list is twelve hypotheses. Whether a licence class covers your category, which competing line is already in the portfolio, and whether the warehouse is what the website claims, are answered by turning up.
02
Being there in month four
Export markets rarely fail loudly. The reorder slips a cycle, replies come slower, and from Canada it reads as normal until two quarters have gone. Noticing requires being in the market on an ordinary Tuesday.
03
Correspondence with a deadline
Regulatory letters arrive in the local language, addressed to whoever is nearest, and they carry dates. Someone has to open them, understand them, and act inside the window.
How we work
Four commitments you can hold us to
We are paid in fees, not commission
A percentage of the trade rewards closing any deal rather than the right one, and several funding programmes disallow it outright. You pay for the work, and the commercial relationship stays yours.
We will tell you not to enter
The most valuable finding an assessment produces is sometimes that a market is closed to your category or uneconomic at your price. You would rather hear it in week three than in year two.
Every figure carries its source
Duty rates, classifications and certificate requirements are published with the document we read and the date we read it. Where we have not verified something it says so, and it never reads as an estimate.
We say what we are not doing
Where the Trade Commissioner Service already covers something, we say so and point you at it. Work outside a retainer is quoted in writing before it starts, including the small pieces.