Poultry

Poultry is the category where the commercial logic of this trade is clearest and the constraints are least understood by people approaching it for the first time.

The logic is straightforward. Parts of the bird that Canadian consumers barely value are parts Asian buyers pay real money for. Feet, paws, gizzards and livers are close to waste in a domestic market built around boneless breast, and they are specialty products in Vietnam, the Philippines and across the region. That asymmetry is what makes a poultry programme worth building rather than a way of moving surplus.

The constraint is supply management. Canadian chicken and turkey are produced under a quota system designed to serve the domestic market first, which shapes both the volume available for export and the price it carries.

An exporter who treats Canadian poultry like Canadian pork, where plants are built at export scale and run long programmes, will find the conversation goes differently. This belongs in the first meeting with a buyer, not the third.

The second constraint is eligibility, and it is finer-grained here than elsewhere. A destination that has approved a Canadian establishment for whole birds has not necessarily approved it for offal, and cooked product is frequently a separate authorisation again with its own conditions on heat treatment. Approval does not travel across those lines by default. Confirm it per line before pricing one.

Production is concentrated in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta. The sub-categories below set out how each line is classified and what it costs to land in each of the six markets, with the government page behind every figure.