Product Registration in Vietnam

Vietnam approves the plant before it approves the shipment, and for some products it approves the importer's permit as well. None of it is quick, and all of it happens before a commercial conversation is worth having.

A note on sourcing first. Vietnam's own regulator publishes its requirements in Vietnamese, and its legal repositories are not reachable from where this page was written. Everything below is read from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's statement of what Vietnam requires, which is the authoritative Canadian source and is what your CFIA export specialist will work from.

CFIA itself notes that parts of that page come from external sources and that anyone relying on it should confirm with the source. Treat this as the map, not the territory.

Meat and poultry: the plant is approved on a Vietnamese form

Establishments must be approved by the Vietnamese authorities before they may export meat or poultry. The application is made on Form 9 of Appendix 1 of Decree 15/2018/ND-CP of 2 February 2018, which CFIA distributes as Annex D through its Area Office export specialist rather than leaving you to find it.

Budget for the wait. CFIA states the approval procedure takes a minimum of thirty working days after the required information reaches the Vietnamese authorities, and a minimum is not an estimate of the typical case.

There is one exemption worth knowing: establishments exporting ready-to-eat beef or pork products are not required to appear on Vietnam's approved facility list. If your product is RTE, you may have a considerably shorter route in than a neighbouring plant shipping raw primals.

Canada and Vietnam have reached an agreement on the sanitary conditions applying to pork, beef and poultry meat, which is the framework the establishment approval sits inside.

Meat and poultry: the documents that travel

Every consignment of meat and meat products to Vietnam needs a Certificate of Inspection Covering Meat Products, CFIA form 1454. On top of that, the annex depends on the species: Annex A for pork, including bone-in and boneless edible products from a pig carcass, bones, and heart, liver and kidney offal; Annex B for poultry; Annex C for beef.

Fish and seafood: two different regimes

For non-live products, establishments must be approved and appear on the list administered by Vietnam's Department of Animal Health and Production before export.

There is a substantial carve-out. Processing establishments do not need to appear on that list where the products are processed, meaning cooked, blanched, steamed, smoked, dried, marinated or salted, and pre-packaged with proper labelling, or where they are declared for further processing and re-export, not for consumption in Vietnam.

CFIA flags this particular point as unofficial and tells exporters to confirm it with their importer or the Canadian embassy in Vietnam, so confirm it rather than plan on it.

Live product is a different world. Live lobster, Dungeness crab and geoduck clam need a specialised import permit from Vietnam's Department of Fisheries and Fisheries Surveillance, obtained before import. Live Pacific oyster needs no specialised permit. Any other live species has to go through a risk assessment before a permit can be issued at all.

That specialised permit is issued to the Vietnamese importer, names the foreign exporter, and is typically valid for one year. Every live consignment additionally needs an import quarantine permit from the Department of Animal Health and Production, also issued to the importer, naming the exporter, and typically valid for only three months.

Read those two sentences again if you sell live product, because they contain the commercial point: both permits name you. Changing importer does not just mean finding another buyer, it means the permits naming you have to be reissued to somebody else, on a three-month clock for the quarantine permit.

Food supplements are not food here

CFIA's understanding is that encapsulated oils derived from aquatic species are eligible but classify as a food supplement or nutraceutical, not as seafood, with a separate import requirement. For those, the importer must register the product brand with the Vietnam Food Administration under a more demanding dossier.

If your product sits anywhere near that boundary, establish which side of it Vietnam puts it on before you build a plan on the seafood route.

What to do first

Ask your CFIA area office export specialist for the relevant annex and start the establishment approval, because thirty working days is the floor and nothing else can proceed past it. Settle with your importer who obtains which permit and what happens to the permits if the relationship ends. And confirm the carve-outs instead of relying on them, since the source itself says to.