About
We run your channel in Southeast Asia
We build and run the Southeast Asian sales channel for Canadian food, drink and consumer-product companies. We choose the market. We hold the registration.
We qualify the distributor and negotiate the terms. Then we stay accountable for the channel once it is running.
Why this works
Canadians at both ends of the trade
Most firms selling Southeast Asian market entry sit on one side of the ocean. A Canadian consultancy understands your SFCR licence, your CFIA certificate and your production calendar.
Then it emails a distributor in Ho Chi Minh City and waits. An agency in Singapore or Bangkok knows the buyers, but has never seen a Canadian export file.
It cannot tell you whether your plant can be certified for the market it is pitching you into.
Both halves are necessary. Neither is enough on its own. We are Canadians in Canada and Canadians in Southeast Asia, working one file from both ends.
One side reads your specification, your establishment approval and your origin position. The other sits 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.
You can check every number we give you
Duty rates, product codes and certificate requirements all link back to the government page they came from, so you never have to take our word for it. Where we have not confirmed something it says so, and it is never dressed up as a figure.
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.