Los Angeles · International CPG Consulting
We help U.S. consumer brands build their own international operation correctly from the start. You own the relationships. We build the architecture.
Pelagon derives from the Ancient Greek word πέλαγος, meaning the open sea. The name reflects our view of international expansion as navigation, not acceleration. In open water, judgment matters more than speed.
Consulting Services
We provide the expertise, data, and commercial structure for brands that want to own and manage their own international expansion. Advisory, not execution. You stay in control.
Identify the right markets for your category. Real data on pricing, competitive activity, channel landscape, and regulatory classification before any commitment is made. We build a shortlist that makes commercial sense, not one that looks good in a presentation.
Source and evaluate in-country partners based on actual track record. What they have moved, which brands they have built, and what their retail footprint looks like today. A distributor who presents well is not the same as one who builds markets.
Navigate pre-market requirements across LATAM, MENA, and Asia. Registration strategy, product classification decisions, and compliance planning structured before the first shipment. Fixing a regulatory problem after product is in market is slow and expensive.
Build distributor agreements with real teeth. Registration ownership in the right hands, enforceable pricing terms, and exit provisions that protect the brand if the relationship stops working. A contract with no real exit is not a contract. It is a trap.
Establish export pricing, distributor margin, and retail price before the first shipment. Landed cost analysis, trade spend modeling, and channel pricing structure. Pricing discipline set early is far easier than correcting a mispriced market after the fact.
Monitor channel pricing, distributor performance, and marketplace listings on an ongoing basis. Unauthorized resellers, pricing leakage, and distributor drift surface early rather than appearing six months later on a quarterly call.
How It Works
Every engagement is scoped to the specific situation. Some clients need full market entry planning. Others come to us to fix a distributor relationship, resolve a registration issue, or build a pricing structure before the first shipment.
We start with a direct conversation about where you are, what you have tried, and what is holding up the expansion. No pitch. No capabilities deck. We need to understand the real situation before we propose anything.
We define the specific deliverables, timelines, and fees upfront. Market entry strategy, distributor identification, regulatory roadmap, deal structure review, or some combination. Clarity on scope before work begins.
We do the research, produce the analysis, and deliver recommendations in formats you can actually use: market briefs, distributor shortlists, pricing models, agreement redlines. Practical outputs, not slide decks.
Some clients engage us for a defined project. Others retain us on an ongoing basis to stay on top of distributor performance, pricing monitoring, and market developments. We structure this based on what the situation actually requires.
Before You Reach Out
We keep the client list small. If the following describes where you are, there is likely a fit worth exploring.
Your product has proven sell-through in the U.S. market. You are deciding where to take it internationally and how to do it without building a problem you have to fix later.
OTC, health and beauty, VMS, or personal care. Categories where distribution quality, channel control, and regulatory structure determine whether the international business is worth having.
You care about who controls the registrations, how pricing holds across channels, and whether there is a real exit if the distributor relationship stops working. You are building something, not just shipping product.
You want an honest read on whether the market and the structure make sense before committing. Speed matters less to you than getting it right.
Markets We Cover
We focus on markets where distribution is complex, regulatory requirements are real, and the consequences of a badly structured entry are significant. Experience in them is what matters.
Every country has its own retail structure, its own regulatory framework, and its own distributor landscape. LATAM rewards patience and punishes brands that move too fast across too many markets at once. Direct experience across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Central America.
Strong consumer demand and high purchasing power in the GCC. Pricing control and registration ownership are the two things that separate a good business from a bad one in this region. Experience covers the GCC markets, Egypt, and selected North Africa markets.
High potential, high complexity, and real consequences for getting the initial entry wrong. Consumer demand for U.S. FMCG and wellness brands is strong across the region. The cost of fixing a poorly structured first entry is measured in years, not months.
When Regulation Is Part of the Picture
Not every FMCG category requires pre-market regulatory approval. But for OTC, health and beauty, and personal care, compliance is a real factor in market entry. We know these frameworks well enough to plan around them before any commitment is made.
Latin America is not one market. Every country has its own regulatory framework. COFEPRIS in Mexico is one of the more demanding examples: registration timelines are real, classification disputes are common, and distributor-held registrations are one of the most frequent problems we inherit from prior engagements.
The UAE sits at the center of MENA distribution for personal care and health products. The Emirates Authority for Standardization and the Ministry of Health both play a role depending on product classification. Getting this right upfront separates a smooth entry from a customs hold that derails the launch timeline.
Regulatory requirements vary significantly across Asian markets. The Philippine FDA governs OTC and personal care product registration for one of our primary markets. In China, the NMPA governs cosmetics, health foods, and OTC drugs with long timelines and extensive documentation requirements.
Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration and Health Canada both operate rigorous pre-market frameworks for health and OTC products. Both are often treated as straightforward markets by U.S. brands. They are not. Both require specific registration pathways planned well in advance.
Regulatory requirements change. The above reflects our working knowledge as of early 2026. We verify current requirements before making any recommendations.
AI Capability
We use AI to get better information faster: on markets, on distributors, and on what is happening in the channel once a brand is live. It does not replace judgment. It makes the judgment better.
Before recommending a market, we pull real data on how the category is performing there, what the competitive set looks like, and whether the commercial and regulatory path is realistic for your product. It takes days instead of weeks and it is more current than anything that comes out of a traditional research report.
We look at what a distributor has actually done: which brands they carry, how those brands are showing up in the market, what their retail footprint looks like. A distributor who looks great in a meeting can look very different when you actually look at the data.
We track pricing and listings across online and offline channels in your active markets. If your product starts showing up somewhere it should not, or if pricing starts slipping, we see it early, before it becomes a bigger problem.
AI tools give us better information than we could get any other way at this speed. We use them on every engagement. But the decisions on which market to enter, which distributor to pick, and how to structure the deal are still made by people who have done this work before.
How We Think
These are not principles we put on a slide. They are the things we push back on when clients want to skip them.
The business you build in an international market should belong to you. That means owning registrations where they exist, controlling customer relationships, and having distributor agreements with real teeth. We make sure the structure reflects that from the start.
Pricing discipline must be established before the first shipment. Once product is in market at the wrong price, it is very hard to pull back. Retailers resist it. Distributors resist it. The brand usually ends up absorbing the cost.
Distributor agreements need real termination rights and clear transition provisions. A contract with no exit is not a partnership. It is a liability. We have seen enough of these situations to know how to structure agreements that actually protect the brand.
Across every FMCG category and every market we work in, the single biggest variable in whether an international expansion works is distributor selection. We evaluate based on what distributors have actually done for other brands, not what they say they will do for yours.
Entering five markets simultaneously sounds like momentum. It usually means doing all five badly. We push clients to go deep in fewer markets and expand once the model is actually working.
We work with a small number of clients at any time. That is not a positioning statement. It is how we make sure the work is actually good. We would rather turn down business than take on more than we can handle well.
The Firm
Pelagon Consulting is a boutique advisory firm based in Los Angeles. We work with U.S. consumer brands, from emerging FMCG startups to established CPG companies, that are either entering international markets for the first time or trying to fix problems in markets they are already in.
The issues we focus on are not glamorous: whether you are in the right market for your category, whether your distributor has actually built brands before or just warehouses product, and whether your pricing architecture will hold up as the business scales. For brands in OTC, health and beauty, and personal care, we also cover the compliance and registration side. But that is one part of what we do, not the whole thing.
We keep the client list small on purpose. The work takes time to do well, and we are not interested in taking on more than we can actually handle.
The Team
The Pelagon team has backgrounds in international FMCG and consumer health trade, distributor management across LATAM, MENA, and Asia, regulatory navigation in OTC, health and beauty, and personal care, government relations, and global finance.
The common thread is direct operational experience. We have negotiated the distributor agreements, dealt with the registration disputes, and managed the situations where a market that looked great in a deck turned out to be much harder in practice. That experience is what we bring to every client engagement.
Regulatory Partners
For OTC, health and beauty, and personal care categories, regulatory compliance is a non-negotiable part of market entry. Pelagon Consulting works with specialized legal and regulatory partners in key markets to ensure product registrations, labeling requirements, and sanitary authorizations are structured correctly from the start.
Cohen Abogados is a Mexico City-based regulatory law firm with 12 years of experience navigating the Mexican regulatory landscape across COFEPRIS, PROFECO, IMPI, SEMARNAT, and STPS. Their team of lawyers, chemists, and economists provides end-to-end regulatory strategy and government representation for companies importing and commercializing consumer products in Mexico. Clients include Nestlé, 3M, Danone, Hyland's, and Galderma. Cohen Abogados is Pelagon's designated regulatory partner for COFEPRIS registration, sanitary licensing, and product compliance in the Mexican market.
cohenabogados.mx →Contact
Tell us about your brand and the challenge you are working through. We will follow up directly if there is a fit worth exploring.
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