So you want to buy an agrochemical from China? The easiest thing to do would be to fly to Shanghai during an agrochemical conference, walk around the trade floor, and introduce yourself as an importer looking to distribute in Canada. And this would work. You would be able to find existing registrants in Canada who would sell a plethora of products to you for import and resale. But there's a problem with this: the companies you'd most easily connect with in China are traders, meaning they consolidate international orders and then bid them out within China to the lowest price manufacturer. This interaction between you, the trader and the manufacturer is transactional at best. And because there's no relationship to build or maintain, the manufacturer is incentivized only to produce the cheapest possible product, often cutting corners on quality to maximize their own profits, and you'll never get the same product twice.
While this is the generic strategy for many ag distributors in Canada, it's certainly not ours.
Because we sell Certified Premium Generics, Paradigm Inputs curates a custom supply chain strategy for each individual active ingredient we sell. That starts in China, where we partner with respected, well-connected agrochemical experts who have spent their careers dedicated to this space and the products that end up in your shed. It's the most important relationship we've built there, and that local team is what lets us seek out and develop partnerships with the producers and formulators who meet our strict criteria for the products we sell in Canada.
We prioritize manufacturers that are not only the true producers of each molecule (i.e., NOT traders), but are also fully back-integrated to own the raw inputs for those molecules as well. Our thesis is one of price and quality: with constant downward pressure on pricing, the manufacturers with the true lowest cost of production will win in the long run, and those same manufacturers are the ones least likely to cut quality corners to save on costs.
But we don't stop there! We work directly with these suppliers, with help from our Chinese team, to ensure we're crystal clear with them on our formulations and quality standards. We then batch test every production run through an independent lab to confirm conformity (trust but verify). This is not the burdensome workload it might sound like, because the manufacturers we choose to work with already take extreme pride in the quality of their products. They want to produce the best possible products in order to grow their volumes over time and they understand it only takes one major quality incident to burn their reputation.
While we don't sell kayaks and pallets of croissants under the same roof, our entire supply chain and logistics approach takes inspiration from Costco meaning we view our vendors as partners in a shared mission, not adversaries to be squeezed. We credit Jim Sinegal for the "tough but fair" approach Paradigm Inputs takes where we work to extract the lowest honest price from our producers rather than bullying them into an unsustainable one. Our Chinese team are genuine experts in the underlying raw input and commodity costs of the products we sell. So when a supplier comes to us with a price increase, we already know if that increase is justified or opportunistic and can push back accordingly.
To be clear, we're not there yet on every single product, because we're, admittedly, not buying at Costco's volume and purchasing power, so let's not get ahead of ourselves. But this is the standard we're actively building toward across our full portfolio and some active ingredients are further along that path than others and every sourcing decision continually gets measured against, not a bar we've already declared met and moved on from.
At the end of the day, sourcing agrochemicals out of China was never the hard part, any importer can find a trader at a Shanghai trade show willing to sell. The hard part is building true partnerships in the supply chain that we can actually stand behind. The relationships, the standards, the testing, and the discipline to walk away from low quality product at any price are all part of that hard part. The efficiency we build through our entire supply chain means that we get the highest possible quality and can still provide end growers with a price that's several dollars per acre lower than the branded equivalent. Just like Costco.
Cassandra Johnstone
Chief Operating Officer
Paradigm Inputs