Longacre.
Origin compliance · Steel · Aluminum · Copper
Steel and aluminum importers now have to report country of smelt, pour, melt, cast, on every entry and audit. That evidence lives in mill test certificates, often lost in inboxes and folders. Longacre retrieves and reads those certificates, resolves them to the physical unit they describe, and gives you an origin answer you can defend to CBP.
Select an identifier to resolve:
Illustrative sample records. Not live customer data.
The problem
For decades, steel and aluminum importers had to provide country of origin on their entries, as the last place a product was substantially transformed. Since April 2025, that isn't enough. They now have to report where the metal was processed (melted, poured, smelted, cast), plus the percent composition of every product, on every entry.
Those fields weren't systematically stored because entry clearance didn't require them. The proof exists, but as PDFs: mill test certificates emailed shipment by shipment, rarely tied back to the unit they describe. Most certificates don't state a country outright; it has to be inferred from the data on the page.
So importers have been defaulting conservatively, declaring the worst case to keep freight moving and paying duty they may not owe. Meanwhile CBP's enforcement posture has changed towards greater scrutiny and frequently leading with the action instead of questions. Getting the declaration right at the time of filing is more critical than ever.
CBP CF-28 and CF-29 issuance data, Q1 2025 – Q2 2026.
What Longacre does
Bulk upload your mill test certificates. Digitally native, scanned, photographed, or crooked. No integration required to start.
Pull the fields that matter — heat and unit identifiers, mill, process, chemical composition — out of formats that differ from every mill you buy from.
Determine country of melt and pour, or smelt and cast, from what the document actually shows, and tie it to the physical unit it describes.
Query by unit, product, or entry and get the origin chain with the source certificate behind it — for the entry summary today, and for the CF-28 response when it lands.
Mill test certificates are not a standard format. Every mill lays them out differently, and half of them arrive as a photograph of a piece of paper. Longacre is built for that reality rather than assuming clean data that has never existed in this industry.
These are legal declarations, and a trade compliance professional should be the one making them. Longacre does the retrieval and the reading, and hands your team a structured answer with a confidence score and the source document behind it. Anything genuinely ambiguous is routed for human review rather than quietly guessed at, so your people spend their judgment where judgment is actually required.
Who's building it
A decade building trade and supply chain technology being used in production at the largest importers, LSPs, and trade financiers worldwide, including 8 of the top 10 logistics providers.
That work has put me at every stage of the value chain: upstream with materials provenance, midstream with processors and trade finance, and at the point of entry with customs compliance through clearance. In 2026, I took and passed the US Customs Broker License exam, because everything I build for this industry has to hold up to the same regulatory standard my customers are held to.
I was close to these importers and their brokers when the 2025 rules landed and watched them get asked for data they had no way to produce. I decided to build the answer.
Former IBM · MonetaGo · Altana
I'm working with a small number of importers of record in steel, aluminum, and copper to shape what gets built first. If that's you — or you've just been handed a CF-28 — get in touch.
eleanor@longacre.ai