Foreign Trade Zone Companies List: Where the Names Are

There is no single public list of foreign trade zone companies. The closest thing is the FTZ Board's production approvals list, which groups companies holding production authority by industry. Most entries give a location, a zone or subzone number, a product and an approval date. Zone contacts, sites, subzones and Federal Register notices live in OFIS, the zone information system linked from the FTZ Board's resource page.

So you build the list yourself. Pull names from the approvals list. Add zone context from OFIS. Check that each plant still runs. Then find the people who decide.

Good copy will not rescue a bad list or a weak sender, so this campaign is won or lost in the list work. Nothing here is legal advice.

What counts as a foreign trade zone company?

The trade.gov overview defines a zone as a site licensed by the FTZ Board where special customs procedures can be used. CBP calls zones secure areas under its supervision, in or near ports of entry, where foreign and domestic goods can be stored, exhibited, assembled, manufactured and processed.

People say "FTZ company" about four different roles. Each role is published in a different place, so a list that ignores the difference will mix ports with plants.

For prospecting, the production user is the role that matters most. Under the Board's rules in 15 CFR Part 400, production activity in a zone requires authority from the Board, which applies set criteria when deciding on an application. A manufacturer working in a zone therefore usually leaves an approval on the public record.

Subzones, which trade.gov also calls usage-driven sites, are approved for one specific company or use. A subzone number tends to point at one firm's plant, and that makes it a clean lead.

That also sets the limits of any FTZ list. You can get named production users with their products, plus every zone's grantee and contacts. You cannot get the full set of warehouse and distribution users at shared sites, because storing goods needs no production authority and I found no public page that collects those tenants.

Where are FTZ company names published?

Six kinds of source either carry names or tell you how to read them. They break down like this:

OFIS covers every zone, and grantees also use it to submit their annual report. I treat it as the record of truth for zone details. When another page disagrees with OFIS about a zone, OFIS wins.

The Board's annual report page serves grantees and operators who file the yearly report to Congress. If you hoped to find a tenant list inside the annual report, there is none. For a seller it is background reading.

State zone tables list each zone's number, grantee and CBP port of entry. Grantees are mostly ports and cities, so the tables help with geography and grantee names, not with tenants. Confirm any zone you plan to work through in OFIS. The NAFTZ FTZ Marketplace is a different kind of list: it names FTZ service providers, from customs brokers to bonded warehouses and 3PLs. That makes it a vendor directory, not a list of zone users.

Which FTZ record fits the buyer you sell to?

The right starting record depends on who signs your purchase orders. Three seller types come up most often.

You sell to plants. That covers production equipment, parts, maintenance, packaging, freight, customs brokerage and trade compliance services. Start with the production approvals list. The product column tells you in seconds whether a plant can use you.

You sell to whoever runs the zone. That covers site development, zone administration and FTZ inventory or reporting software. Start with OFIS contacts. Grantees are mostly ports, cities and development bodies, so expect public-sector buyers.

You sell to storage and distribution users. No public record names them. Start from the zone sites in OFIS, match the addresses in a company database, and ask the grantee who operates there.

If you are a European supplier going after American plants, my piece on selling into the US from Europe covers what has to be in place before your first message goes out. The list is only one part of that work.

Before you open any FTZ source, look at your own customers. I start every list with the companies that already pay the client, then find other companies that resemble them. If 2 of your customers sit under Auto Parts on the approvals page, that heading is your first slice.

How do you read the production approvals list?

The page is one long text list split into industry headings. They run from Construction Equipment and Industrial/Machinery Equipment to Vehicles, Auto Parts, Pharmaceutical, Chemicals, Oil Refineries/Petrochemical Facilities and Liquified Natural Gas. The first names on the page are Advanced Optowave Corporation, AGFA Materials Corporation and Alcatel Submarine Networks.

Each entry should carry a company, a location, a zone or subzone number, a product and an approval date, though a few skip the zone number, the product or the date. Here is what each field does for a seller:

Read the page's own warning before you trust a row. It says the list covers companies that currently hold FTZ production authority, and that some of them may not be using it right now. An approval proves a plant qualified at some point. Whether the line runs today is something you still have to check.

To work with a page this long, copy one heading into a spreadsheet, split each entry into the five fields and sort by state. If you only care about one region, searching the page for the state name is faster. If you already have a company name, the FTZ Production Database inside OFIS lets you search for it directly.

Then sort by recency. This is the rule I suggest:

1. Approval or Federal Register notice in the last 5 years: first wave.
2. Older approval, but recent company news about that plant: first wave.
3. Older approval and no recent news: check by hand before it goes in.
4. Plant closed, sold or moved: drop it.

The Federal Register notices in OFIS, the government's official public announcements, deserve a second look. They can show a company asking for new or wider production authority. Here is one example of the notice type: in May 2026, a Federal Register notice showed Patheon API, Inc. notifying the FTZ Board of proposed production activity at its facility in Florence, South Carolina. The site sits in Subzone 21J.

That is the best moment to write. A plant changing what it makes has a real reason to look at new suppliers.

How do you turn FTZ records into a usable contact list?

1. Pick one industry heading that matches what you sell and where you already have proof.
2. Copy it into a sheet with one column per field.
3. Add the grantee, the site and any Federal Register notice from OFIS.
4. Confirm the plant still runs, using its website, recent news and the notices. Flag what you cannot confirm.
5. Match each company to a database record, then find the people.
6. Keep only the titles that decide on your offer.
7. Verify every address before anything is sent.
8. Give each company one owner on your team and remove duplicates.

Step 5 is where most FTZ lists break. Find the people in proper prospecting tools such as Sales Navigator, Apollo, ZoomInfo, UpLead or RocketReach. A list built that way beats a scraped one, and cheap lists bought from freelancers usually come back with low open rates and high bounces.

Titles decide the rest. Use the titles this niche actually gives its buyers, and cut generic ones like Assistant, Associate and plain Manager. A manager title stays only when the function is written into it.

Every address we send to goes through NeverBounce or DeBounce, and we keep the bounce rate under 0.5%. I also look at the list itself before anyone writes copy, taking it apart row by row before I trust it with a campaign.

A company earns a row only when all four checks pass:

1. It appears in an official FTZ record or a credible press report.
2. You have confirmed it still operates the site.
3. You found at least one title from the table.
4. That person's address passed verification.

Anything that fails a check waits in a separate tab. Rebuild the contact layer on a schedule. People in plant and compliance roles change jobs, and an old export will bounce.

Which states and industries should you start with?

Pick the industry first and the geography second. The heading tells you whether your offer fits a plant at all. The state tells you who on your team owns the account and whether your proof is close enough to count.

I found no official source that ranks states by FTZ companies, so count zone numbers per state in the OFIS zone list yourself. More zones means more grantees and ports to work through.

A zone count says nothing about how many plants hold production authority, so count those from the approvals page for your heading. For scale, the FTZ Board prepares an annual report to Congress from data each zone submits. Site Selection, summarizing the August 2024 report, counted 200 active FTZs and 374 active production operations during 2023.

For the biggest activity, trade press is faster. The same Site Selection piece built its ranking on the Board's annual report data, and it put FTZ 124 at the Port of South Louisiana first for 2023. The same piece ties BMW to the zone in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and Mercedes-Benz U.S. International to Port Birmingham, Alabama.

That write-up also reports plans by Life for Tyres and Woodland Biofuels to build at the Port of South Louisiana. On the approvals page, the closest headings are Vehicles and Auto Parts for the South Carolina and Alabama names, and Chemicals, Oil Refineries/Petrochemical Facilities and Liquified Natural Gas for Louisiana.

One heading plus 2 or 3 states is a small market, and small markets change the tooling. Intent data earns its keep when the market is large. On a slice of, say, 500 target companies where only a few show any signal, it tells you almost nothing. I skip it and put the work into an offer every plant in that slice would care about.

With so few accounts, the pull is to write only to perfect fits. Send to just 50 to 100 perfect-fit contacts a month and the whole month turns into a coin flip on whether those people are too busy, not ready or simply not interested. So decide early whether to run them as named accounts or a broad list. That choice changes how much research goes into each row.

How do you write to the people at FTZ plants?

Stay with one heading and one offer for 12 months. A plant manager at an auto parts maker and a trade compliance director at a refinery want different things, and one message will reach neither of them properly.

Use the product field for your first line, and sell the meeting instead of the service. Leave the zone out of the message. The FTZ record only told you where to look; the plant buys parts and service, so talk about the plant.

Here is an invented first email from a hydraulic cylinder rebuild shop. It pulled its list from Construction Equipment and kept only the plants its service vans can reach in a day:

Subject: Cylinder rebuilds for your loader line

Hi Dana, your plant builds wheel loaders, so a cylinder waiting on a rebuild probably means a stalled station. We rebuild cylinders for equipment plants in your region, most of them back on site within a week. Would a 15-minute call next Tuesday be useful for your maintenance team?

One email is a weak start. I would open with a LinkedIn touch, so the email arrives from a name the plant manager has already seen, and plan at least 5 or 6 touches across both channels. In our campaigns, the 3rd follow-up, sent with real time after the one before it, is usually the one that gets the answer.

Expect to be checked. A maintenance director or compliance lead will look at your LinkedIn profile and your website before agreeing to a call. The proof there has to match the claim in your email. A weak message from a strong profile still beats a perfect one from a ghost.

If a verified, well-titled list still gets silence after a few weeks, look at how the offer is packaged before you change the channel or the volume. And if you hire someone to build the list, ask for a sample of rows before you see any copy, then check those rows against the approvals page yourself. Our cold email agency work starts from the same list checks.

Start with one heading

Pick one industry heading where you already have customers. Build your first 50 verified rows by hand, checking each plant against the approvals page. Use them to test the offer and the list quality, then widen to the whole heading before you judge results.

If you sell to US plants and cannot decide which FTZ heading to start with, book a call and bring your customer list. I will point to the slice I would test first.