Three packages, photographed in three countries, in the same season. One reads Golden Lychee. One reads Litchi doré. One reads ゴールデン ライチ. Underneath each label: the same fruit, from the same Bắc Giang orchards, picked in the same harvest window.
In 2025, Dragonberry put a single Vietnamese harvest onto Costco shelves in the United States, Canada, and Japan, each market under its own clearance, its own packaging, its own language. The photographs are the proof. The program behind them is the story.
The orchard side
The shelf is where the story ends. It begins in Bắc Giang, the northern Vietnamese province whose orchards grow the fruit Dragonberry markets as the Golden Lychee. Since early 2024, Dragonberry has been on the ground there with the province’s agricultural leadership, bringing more than two decades of high-value produce distribution experience directly to the source, enrolling orchards into the program, and giving growers hands-on technical support that has lifted both crop quality and farming resilience.
The premise is simple and demanding: export quality is built at the orchard, not inspected at the port. The orchards meet Global G.A.P. certification, the world-recognized export standard. The same season, the Hanoi Irradiation Center, the regulatory bridge that allows Vietnamese lychees to clear U.S. quarantine, was approved by Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Environment and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (APHIS).
With Dragonberry International Vietnam Ltd. receiving approval to operate directly in Vietnam, all pieces were in place (see From Hanoi to Canby in Eleven Years). Supply certified, bridge open, presence established. What remained was the part most exporters never attempt: landing one harvest in three markets at once.
Three markets, one harvest
Every destination writes its own rules. A fruit cleared for the United States is not cleared for Japan; a label compliant in California is not compliant in Quebec. Phytosanitary protocols, import permits, packaging law, retail-ready presentation, each market maintains its own regime, and none of them defers to the others. Most exporters build for one market and stay there, because one is hard enough.
U.S.
Golden Lychee
APHIS quarantine via Hanoi irradiation
First with Costco
CA
Litchi doré
Bilingual label law · Quebec compliant
Returning, second
JP
ゴールデン ライチ
Japanese phytosanitary & labeling regime
First in Japan
In 2025, the Golden Lychee landed in three: a first season with Costco in the United States, a returning second season with Costco in Canada, and a first season in Japan, three clearance regimes, three labeling requirements, three sets of logistics, all handled within a single harvest window.
And the lychee’s window is unforgiving – a short, fixed season that does not wait for paperwork. Clearing three regulatory regimes inside it means the work was done long before the fruit left the tree.
That is the difference between selling fruit abroad and operating as an international distributor. One is a transaction. The other is infrastructure, and infrastructure is what shows up on three shelves, in three languages, at once.
What's next
The map is still being drawn. Shanghai becomes the fourth Costco market for the Golden Lychee, opening this season, and notably, the “three languages” only multiply from here.
The lychee corridor is not the end of the playbook either: longan, guava, and passion fruit are in the U.S. regulatory approval pipeline, each positioned to ride the same Dragonberry-built infrastructure that the Golden Lychee proved. The economics of that sequence matter: the first fruit pays for the infrastructure; every fruit after it inherits the corridor.
And the corridor is designed to run both directions, alongside Vietnamese fruit moving east, Dragonberry is positioning Pacific Northwest produce, from apples to cherries, for the Vietnamese market.
The 2025 season was a proof of concept. For the growers in Bắc Giang, whose orchards now feed an international program rather than a single buyer, and for Dragonberry, which is not an exporter with one good year but an international distributor with three market launches behind it and a fourth opening. The proof is on shelves now, in three languages.
