Fortway based in Shanghai. From here we work with hundreds of Chinese factories and ship food ingredients to food manufacturers, and distributors around the world. Most of the people in this office have spent their entire career inside the Chinese ingredient industry, which is the only real way to know it.
Why is buying ingredients from China so hard? In 2009, Michael Chan, then a purchasing manager at Atlantic Chemicals Trading, kept watching overseas buyers get burned by the same three problems: opaque pricing, samples that didn't match shipments, and brokers who couldn't actually answer technical questions.
After years of watching the gap from inside the trading industry, he left Atlantic Chemicals Trading and founded Fortway in Shanghai, with a simple idea: a buyer should be able to talk to one person in Shanghai and get a real answer, a real factory, and a real shipment.
Michael spent his early years at Atlantic Chemicals Trading negotiating purchases on behalf of multinational customers, which gave him a clear view of what good factory selection looks like and where overseas buyers typically lose money. That experience became the operating manual for Fortway: deal directly with the manufacturer, verify before you ship, and never put your customer in front of a problem you could have caught yourself.
A decade later, that is still the shape of the business. We have grown into more product categories and more customers across more countries, but the model has not changed: one desk in Shanghai, direct relationships with factories, a professional team that knows the products.
Creative.Every order has its own constraints: port, certification, packaging, lead time. "The standard way" rarely fits, so we design each shipment around what the customer actually needs.
Open. We would rather tell a customer that a price does not work, or that a spec is unrealistic, than walk them into a bad shipment.
Responsible. Once a container leaves Shanghai, our name is on it. We own what we ship.
Entrepreneurial.The customer's problem is the company's problem, and somebody on the team will own it until it is solved.
Fortway is a professional team. The three man below have run this business. When you write to us, you're writing to one of them or to someone who reports directly to them.
Michael founded Fortway in 2009 after years as a purchasing manager at Atlantic Chemicals Trading. He sets the company's commercial relationships with factories and handles the largest customer accounts personally. If a quote, a spec, or a shipment matters, it eventually ends up on his desk.
David has spent fifteen years in the aspartame business specifically. First inside a manufacturer, now leading sales at Fortway. That depth shows up in the way he talks to customers about specifications, polymorph behavior, and the difference between what a factory says it can do and what it actually does.
Twenty years inside acesulfame-K manufacturing, including running production lines. Mr. Yang is the person we put on technical calls when a customer's R&D team has hard questions, and the person who reviews factory audits before we put a new supplier on the catalog.
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