The Trade Commissioner Service will give us a list of contacts. Why pay for this?

You should take that list, and we will work from it. What the TCS publishes as its own scope is market potential assessment, guidance on barriers and regulations, and tailored lists of qualified contacts. What it does not do is meet them on your behalf, check the licence against your category, negotiate, or still be there in month four when the distributor goes quiet. Buy the list from nobody. Buy the six months after it from us.

Do you charge commission on the trade?

No. This is a fee-based engagement, which is deliberate: a commission model creates an incentive to close any deal rather than the right one. You pay for the search and the introductions, and the commercial relationship is yours.

Can you guarantee we will find a distributor?

No. We can guarantee a qualified search and honest reporting, including telling you when a market does not have a good fit for your product at your price. That answer is worth as much as a list of names, and it is cheaper to hear early.

What if we already have interested buyers?

Then we qualify them, which is often the more valuable piece. Licences, category coverage, channel reach and competitive conflicts are all checkable before you sign, and buyers rarely volunteer the awkward parts.

For ASEAN buyers: can you find us Canadian suppliers?

Yes: that is the same work in the other direction. Send the specification, volume and destination port, and we identify Canadian producers who can supply at that specification and hold the certification your authority requires at entry.

Service

Distributor & Buyer Identification

Start with the Trade Commissioner Service. It is staffed by people in the market and it will give you a list of potential buyers and distributors, so any adviser whose pitch is “we will find you names” is selling you something you can ask Ottawa for. The hard part comes after the list. Somebody has to meet them, check the licence actually covers your product, find out which competing brand is already in the portfolio, and work out whether they will do anything with you once the samples are gone. That is the part we do.

What’s included

A qualified longlist of importers and distributors in the target market for your category, built alongside any list you already hold rather than in competition with it
Verification that each holds the licences the category requires
Channel fit assessment (modern trade, traditional trade, foodservice, industrial) against where your product actually sells
Competitive conflict check against the lines they already carry
Introductions, with your product positioned properly rather than forwarded as a PDF
Support through first conversations, including the registration-ownership question before it is conceded

Commercial terms

Fee range: Scoped per engagement
Typical timeline: Confirmed at scoping

Questions

The Trade Commissioner Service will give us a list of contacts. Why pay for this?: You should take that list, and we will work from it. What the TCS publishes as its own scope is market potential assessment, guidance on barriers and regulations, and tailored lists of qualified contacts. What it does not do is meet them on your behalf, check the licence against your category, negotiate, or still be there in month four when the distributor goes quiet. Buy the list from nobody. Buy the six months after it from us.
Do you charge commission on the trade?: No. This is a fee-based engagement, which is deliberate: a commission model creates an incentive to close any deal rather than the right one. You pay for the search and the introductions, and the commercial relationship is yours.
Can you guarantee we will find a distributor?: No. We can guarantee a qualified search and honest reporting, including telling you when a market does not have a good fit for your product at your price. That answer is worth as much as a list of names, and it is cheaper to hear early.
What if we already have interested buyers?: Then we qualify them, which is often the more valuable piece. Licences, category coverage, channel reach and competitive conflicts are all checkable before you sign, and buyers rarely volunteer the awkward parts.
For ASEAN buyers: can you find us Canadian suppliers?: Yes: that is the same work in the other direction. Send the specification, volume and destination port, and we identify Canadian producers who can supply at that specification and hold the certification your authority requires at entry.

Read before you brief us

The reasoning behind this work, written out in full and free to read. You will brief us better for having read it, and you may decide you do not need us for part of it.

Opportunities for Canadian lobster in Southeast Asian hospitality
Vietnam charges 27 per cent on frozen lobster at the general rate and nothing under CPTPP. That single line is worth more than most Canadian seafood exporters spend on an entire market entry, and it is decided by paperwork rather than by the agreement existing.
Five hotel products that can be sourced from Canada
Food service buys differently from retail: to a plate cost, a specification and a season, with no shelf to win. Five Canadian lines fit that channel in Southeast Asia, and the tariff position separates them sharply by market.
How Asian distributors evaluate a new Canadian brand
A distributor is deciding whether to spend their own money and shelf relationships on you. Understanding what that decision actually turns on, and which parts of it you control, is worth more than a better pitch deck.
What Singapore buyers need from Canadian food producers
Singapore charges no duty on almost everything a Canadian food producer sells, which sounds like the easy market and makes it the demanding one. With price at the border identical for every supplier on earth, the account is won on documentation and reliability.
Start with Vietnam: why the six markets are not one decision
"ASEAN entry" is a phrase that costs money. These are six regulators, six registration routes and two entirely different tariff positions, and entering them in the wrong order is how a budget gets spent proving something the first market would have told you. A sequence, and the reasoning behind it.
The list is not the hard part: what the Trade Commissioner Service does, and where it stops
Canada already runs a service that assesses a market for you and hands you a list of qualified distributors. Any adviser whose pitch is "we will find you names" is selling what you can ask Ottawa for. What the TCS covers, what it asks of you first, and the months after the list where entries stall.
Who pays for market entry: why food exporters sit outside CanExport, and inside AgriMarketing
CanExport SMEs is the programme every Canadian exporter has heard of, and the wrong one for a food business: the sector was moved out of it. The programme that now carries agri-food pays a larger share, stays open for years rather than weeks, and asks for the market work an ASEAN entry needs anyway.
Importing food into Singapore: licence, permit, and the fee per consignment
Singapore is the most open of the six markets on tariffs and the most procedural at the border. What the SFA licence covers, why the permit is per consignment, and the per-consignment fees that decide whether small shipments make sense.

Markets this covers

Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore