Pork

Pork is one of Canada's largest food exports and Southeast Asia is a natural destination for it, because the cuts that Canadian and North American consumers do not prioritise are frequently the cuts Asian buyers value most. Belly, offal, trotters and hocks carry real value here and comparatively little at home, which is what makes the trade work in both directions rather than being a matter of surplus disposal.

Production is concentrated in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta, in plants built at export scale. That matters commercially: an export-scale plant can hold a consistent specification across a long programme, which a domestic-scale one cannot.

The gating question on this category is not price and not specification. It is establishment eligibility: whether the specific plant is approved by the destination authority to ship the specific commodity to that market. It is binary, it is decided overseas, and it is worth confirming before any commercial conversation. An establishment approved for muscle cuts is not automatically approved for offal, and an approval for one destination says nothing about the next.

Beyond that, the decisions are chilled or frozen, the trim standard written out rather than referenced to a photograph, the weight band, and the freezing method, which determines drip loss on thaw and is a real yield cost that never appears in the per-kilogram price.

The sub-categories below separate primal cuts, offal and processed products, because they are different trades with different buyers and, frequently, different eligibility positions.