Import Registry AfricaBrowse importers

◆ Method and sources

Every record here can be checked at its source.

Every record comes from a national regulator and says which one. We retrieve each register from the authority's own public website. Nothing is bought, nothing is licensed, and nothing comes from anyone's customer relationships. That is what makes it checkable, and what makes it ours to publish.
4
registers read
3,238
importers of record
1,034
with a European supplier
From register to lead51,440
registrations read51,440
across four national registers
still valid41,042
10,398 had already expired−10,398
distinct applicants8,549
−32,493
importers of record3,238
the rest manufacture locally−5,311
buying from Europe1,034
−2,204

1,034 of 51,440 survive every cut — 2.0%.

◆ How it is built

Five steps, in order

  1. 01

    Find the register

    Most countries require a food or drink product to be registered before it may be sold. That registration names the local company that took responsibility for it. Where the authority publishes the register, the importer list already exists.

  2. 02

    Read it at source

    Some publish a JSON interface, some a PDF of ninety pages, one publishes a spreadsheet nothing on the site links to. We take whichever form the authority chose, and cite it.

  3. 03

    Classify the products

    On the category column where the register has one, on product wording where it does not. Keyword filters alone are unreliable: gin matches chewing gum, and non-alcoholic beverage contains the word alcohol. Drinks are the eighth category by size, not the first — dairy, bakery, meat and produce all sit in the same registers.

  4. 04

    Separate importers from producers

    The applicant on a locally made product is its manufacturer, not an importer. Only companies with at least one foreign country of origin are counted.

  5. 05

    Confirm the origin

    Each registration carries the country where the product was made. That is what turns a name into a lead: not a company that might buy from Europe, but one that has already cleared Spanish product through its own regulator.

A register is a filing cabinet, not a feed. What we do to it is the product.

Four registers · 51,440 registrations read · 10,398 expired and removed

◆ The limits

What this data cannot tell you

Stated plainly, because a buyer who discovers a limit for themselves stops trusting everything else.
Registration is not a shipment
A registration shows that a company took legal responsibility for putting a product on a market. It does not show volume, value, frequency, or whether that company imported anything last month. If you need shipment-level movements, this is not that dataset.
Domestic market only
Free-zone and transit traders re-export without entering the domestic market, so they never appear in a product register. Shipment data covers them; this does not.
Contact details exist for one register of four
Ghana's authority publishes phone numbers and addresses; Nigeria, Tanzania and Rwanda do not publish any. We say so per market rather than pricing the four as if they were the same product.
Expiry varies
Registrations lapse. Where the register carries an expiry date we keep it; where it does not, currency is only as good as the retrieval date shown on each country page.
4 of fifty-four
Most African regulators do not publish. We would rather name the countries we hold than describe our reach as continental, so the gap is shown on the coverage page.
We can be wrong about who is an importer
Local manufacturers register products too, and separating them from importers is a judgement we make, not a field the authority provides. If we have classified a company wrongly, tell us and we will correct the record and note when we did.

◆ The fields

What a record contains

Published in full, so you can tell whether it holds what you need before you pay for anything.
company_name
the registrant — the importer of record
city
where the register states it
market
the country the registration is valid in
authority
the regulator that granted it
register
the named publication it came from
retrieved
the date we read that publication
registrations
live registrations held, expired ones removed
foreign_registrations
of those, made outside the market
european_registrations
of those, made in Europe
origins[]
each country of manufacture, with a count
top_category
the category the company registers most in
categories[]
the full category mix, with counts
products[]
registered product names
manufacturers[]
the makers named on the registrations
phone, mobile
where the authority publishes them
email, postal_address
where the authority publishes them

Contact fields are published by one of the four authorities. Where a register does not carry a field, we leave it empty rather than infer it.