B2B Trading Platform for the Canned Food Industry

Global canned food trading runs on dense, slow-moving workflows: buyers fax or email enquiries, factories reply through brokers, and comparing offers across currencies, ports and shipment windows takes days. Tropfin needed to digitise this market without touching the business logic locked inside its production ERP — a strict "no-ERP-change" principle — while keeping factory visibility rules, private listings and verified-only results intact, and serving four very different stakeholder groups from one codebase.

We steered the platform from an initially monolithic concept into a decoupled gateway architecture: five frontend channels (login, buyer, seller, broker, admin) each pair with an independent Symfony gateway API that holds no raw business logic and forwards strictly filtered routes to backend security and user domains, with CanBroker remaining the single source of truth. Authentication is passwordless — a six-digit OTP by email — with backoffice impersonation so support staff can safely see exactly what a customer sees, and automatic IP blocking after five failed attempts in an hour. The Enquiry hub lets buyers broadcast product requests and compare seller offers to surface the best price, while the Factory Information module organises supplier profiles into five tabs and a season search maps harvest calendars, raw material intake and finished goods output per factory. Phase 1 was delivered in 2023, the trading and directory modules were signed off in May 2026, and the Buyers Market Watch List — a 5-step product wizard, an 8-parameter matching engine and multi-currency USD price normalization with table and graph views — is in active development.