I'll first talk to NAFTA with respect to the trade we entered into with Mexico. Mexico has a 20.5% tariff on canned seafood products going into its market, and NAFTA allowed us to enter that market when it came into force, and we were able to built a small business, a small footprint. With respect to our products, and within seafood, we're probably different from many other industry participants in that we focus on value-added, branded sales. As such, we're actively competing against entrenched domestic competitors. We participate with distributors in developing distribution at grocery retail outlets in these markets. It's an extremely competitive environment, and it's one that is very costly to enter into and build a branded presence.
We've had, I would say, very limited success. We have a very small share in Mexico. We've seen the competition get better than where they were when NAFTA started, and so the quality of the products that we've competed against has been elevated. We've probably seen our business decline a bit in some of these markets from a peak level several years ago.
There are other factors that go on beyond just gaining a duty-free advantage. CETA is another case in point. We have in fact actively looked at many of the markets, and as you can surmise, we've been doing this for over 125 years. It's a rather mature category, and we face very capable and competent competitors within the EU that have very entrenched brands in these markets.
We actually have benefited from sales into Europe, which we were servicing from Canada previously, before the EU came into being, with basically selling product into ethnic expat communities in the Caribbean, the U.K., and the Netherlands. We actually had developed business in eastern Europe, but as these markets came into the EU realm, we basically faced a 12.5% duty on canned sardine products, and a 20% duty on canned herring products. A lot of those markets went away on us.
We then had to switch our strategy to sourcing some of our product from Europe to make sure that we were competitive within Europe. In conjunction with all of that, we faced a very challenging resource situation here in Atlantic Canada on the supply of herring that we use in the production of our canned sardines and canned herring products. Those factors really constrained us.
We were looking at CETA specifically as perhaps an opportunity to potentially expand into private label supply. Again, there we face a number of factors that we feel make it quite a challenging go in that regard also.