Wine, olive oil and food importers for your product. Found, checked one by one, ready to contact.

Importer lists are easy to find: free in public registers, paid in databases promising tens of thousands of contacts. The work that decides comes afterwards: working out which ones buy a product like yours, in the country you're after, and writing each of them something that holds up. Itria does that work, and the sending stays with you.

This piece is part of the guide to export operations for small food producers and covers the step that comes before all the others: finding someone to sell to.

How to find wine and olive oil importers: the three routes

There are three routes, and they cost in different ways: public bodies and registers, paid databases, a search built around your product. All three give you names. What changes is how much work is left to you before the first message, and how many other producers get the same names.

The route	What it gives you, and what's left to do
ICE and public registers	The ICE service for finding foreign customers and partners is free for companies with up to 100 employees and up to five requests a year. Each country's registers give you names you can rely on. What's left is working out who handles a product like yours, and writing to them.
Paid databases	Thousands of contacts per country, updated by the seller. What's left is filtering them and writing to each one, and the same names go to every customer of the database.
A search built around the product	Fewer names, read on each importer's website, with the reason they're on the list and the first message already written. What's left is the sending, which is yours.

In its own words, the ICE service promises «a selection of local operators consistent with your Company profile» (our translation), an introduction of the company and a list of interested contacts, according to the page for the foreign customers and partners search service. For a small business it's the first door to open, and it costs a company registry extract.

What we deliver, by country and by product

Four things, one country at a time: the list, the rejects with the reason, the first message for each, and a single place where replies arrive. The criteria for who gets on the list are written on day one, with you, before the first name is searched.

What	What it looks like
The list	Importers and distributors in the chosen country who handle a product close to yours, read on their own websites: channel (restaurants, retail chains, wine shops) and price bracket where the website states them.
The rejects, with the reason	Those who import from only one country, those who have closed, those with the right name and someone else's website. Every reject has its own line, so you can see what was looked at.
The first message	For each importer, written about what they publish and in their language: no message could be sent to anyone else.
The replies	Whoever replies goes into a single list, with the history, and the system drafts the reply.

The rule is set out in Ethics: the system prepares and flags, but no message reaches an importer until a person has read and approved it. Messages go out from your mailbox, in your name. What to reply when the importer writes is on the page about how to reply to an importer's email.

Why the list alone isn't enough: 389 names, the right 10

For a client we collected 389 names in twenty-two searches and delivered 10, in order of priority: 2.6%, in one hour and four minutes. The market was a different one (the founder of a software company was looking for Italian professionals to work with), the work is the same: two filters, the thresholds set by the client, a manual read of the thirty that were left.

The work	The figures, and how they were measured
From a list to ten names to contact	389 names collected, 10 delivered, one hour and four minutes from the first search to delivery. For a client, 11 September 2026.
From the list to ready emails	428 names read from five public exhibitor lists, 64 websites found and confirmed (15%), 10 emails written around a flaw verified on each company's website. Measured on a test system, 4 September 2026.
The wrong companies, stopped early	19 companies out of 428, 4.4%, had the right name and someone else's website, and left the list before any email. Same work as 4 September 2026.

By hand the same work takes a week, and somewhere around the two hundredth name you stop reading and start scrolling. It's the same with importers: those who only work with retail chains, those who buy from another region, those who closed last year all end up on the same lists.

Wine and food importers in the US, UK, Canada and Germany: where to start

Importer searches split by country: Google's English suggestions for «wine importers» run to 104 variants, with Germany, the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and cities from London to New York among them (Itria survey of 13 October 2026, US and UK). Every country has a different public source to start from, and different rules on who can import.

Country	The public source to start from
United States	The TTB's federal list of permit holders, which includes alcohol importers.
United Kingdom	The Companies House advanced search, with the activity code for wholesale of beverages or food.
Canada	The Canadian Food Inspection Agency's food licence registry.
Germany and the European Union	The Enterprise Europe Network profiles, where companies post what they're looking for.

How to read each source, field by field, is explained in the guide on how to find foreign importers for free. The documents you need once the importer says yes are on the page about shipping documents.