The paperwork question kills deals at week six.

A first conversation is usually about product and price. The deal is usually decided by whether the supplier can produce a document set your customer, your customs broker or your own quality team will accept. That question tends to get asked late, after samples have been couriered and both sides have spent real money, and it is the most common point at which a promising supply conversation quietly stops.

Asking early is not distrust. It is the cheapest possible way to find out whether a supplier is a fit, and a competent one will not be offended by it. If they cannot answer, that is the answer.

• A product specification. Species or floral source, grade, analytical parameters with the test method beside them, pack format, net weight, shelf life and storage conditions. This is the document your technical team actually needs, and a brochure is not a substitute for it.
• A food safety certification, with its scope. The scope matters more than the certificate. A certificate covering a packing site does not cover a contract manufacturer down the road, and reading only the logo is how an importer discovers the gap during an audit.
• A laboratory report, dated and from a named laboratory. Not a summary retyped onto a letterhead. For honey this is usually the parameter set your market cares about; for produce it may be residues. Check the date, because these expire in practice even when they do not expire on paper.
• Label artwork, before production. Label requirements are set by the destination and differ market to market: language, country of origin, net weight format, importer details, date marking. Approving artwork after a run has been printed is an expensive way to learn this.
• Export documentation the shipment will need. What is required depends on the commodity and the destination. Australian requirements sit with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, and your own import requirements sit with your national authority. Confirm both rather than assuming they mirror each other.
• Proof of the legal entity. An Australian business can be checked in a minute on ABN Lookup and the ASIC register, both public and free. Do it before the first payment, not after a problem.

Worth knowing, because a missing document is not automatically a bad supplier. A small apiary or a family orchard making an excellent product may not hold a certification scheme aimed at industrial manufacturers, and may never have needed one to sell domestically.

The useful question is not whether they hold it today. It is whether their site and their process could pass, what it would cost, and who is paying for it. That is a commercial conversation with an answer. A supplier who says they already hold something and then cannot produce it is a different matter entirely, and that is exactly what asking early surfaces.

We ask producers these questions before we take them anywhere, and we tell an importer what a producer actually holds rather than what would be convenient. Where a document does not exist yet, we say so and say what it would take. We hold none of these documents ourselves: they belong to the producer, and we are not the seller.

Related reading: how counter seasonal supply actually works, a plain guide to Australian honey varieties, and what a disclosed export agent is. All four sit under our guides for importers.