Trump's War on Chocolate: 'There's No Way for Us To Source This Domestically'
American chocolatiers need imports, and tariffs help no one.
I didn't expect economic insights from an animatronic cow.
In the Disney-style ride at Hershey's headquarters that lays out the company's chocolate mythos, the singing, dancing cattle are mostly there to underline the milk in milk chocolate. They also set the scene, explaining why the world's best-known chocolate company was founded here amid the hilly pastures of central Pennsylvania. Many of those pastures contain cows, cows make milk, and back in the 1890s, it was easier to bring cocoa beans and sugar to the milk than the other way around.
But there was something unexpectedly evocative in the ditty that played throughout the ride: "Wherever you go, no matter how far/You'll always see a Hershey bar."
Human beings have been eating chocolate for centuries, but chocolate didn't really become chocolate—the sweet, affordable, and ubiquitous treat—until Milton Hershey and his successors figured out how to assemble a supply chain that stretches across oceans and merge it with American manufacturing expertise. Thanks to assembly lines and economic efficiency, chocolate is within the reach of nearly every human being on the planet.
It's hard to imagine a company like Hershey's existing anywhere except in the U.S., but the key ingredient in its most famous products barely exists here in its raw form. The world's supply of chocolate depends on the global trade of cocoa beans, which are grown exclusively in equatorial climates across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The United States produces more chocolate than any other country in the world, but there would be no American chocolate-making businesses, large or small, without imports.
A lot of American manufacturing is like that too: U.S.-based businesses rely on imported raw materials when making everything from candy bars to new cars. Policies that make those inputs more expensive or difficult to obtain—policies such as the Trump administration's tariffs—are leaving a bitter taste.
Chocolatiers, in particular, say trade barriers are a recipe for higher prices, lower quality, less innovation, and smaller profits. Doesn't sound very sweet, does it?
'There's No Way for Us To Source This Domestically'
Matt Weyandt got into making chocolate because he was trying to escape politics. That hasn't worked out quite as well as the onetime Democratic campaign staffer might have hoped.
After the 2012 election, Weyandt and his wife took their two young kids on what he calls a "family sabbatical" in Costa Rica. They intended to take a break from the stress of working on campaigns, explore a bit, and figure out what to do next. Chocolate wasn't part of the plan, but then the couple started sampling the wares at a local farmers market. Soon they were diving into the world of cacao, learning about the different varieties and distinct flavors that emerge from beans grown in different climates or at different altitudes. (In that regard, chocolate is much like coffee or wine.)
Weyandt has become a nerd about this stuff. His favorite variety of chocolate right now comes from Tanzania. "It's really fruity," he says. "And I think it's really surprising to a lot of people." But he's quick to add that if I asked him to pick a favorite tomorrow, he'd "probably say a different one."
When Weyandt and his wife returned to the U.S., he carried 50 pounds of cocoa beans through customs in a duffle bag. With that initial batch, the couple began making and selling homemade chocolate at farmers markets. In 2014, they co-founded Xocolatl, a bean-to-bar company that now employs 16 people and churns out more than 10 tons of chocolate every year. Xocolatl bars and other chocolate confections are sold at the company's original stall in Atlanta's Krog Street Market and can be found at Whole Foods stores across the southeastern United States.
These days, Weyandt's supply chain is a bit more complex than a duffle bag, but it still depends on products grown outside the U.S. This is the immutable reality for any American chocolate company, from Hershey's on down: There is almost no cocoa grown in the United States.
What little America does produce comes from Hawaii. And while Hawaiian cocoa production has grown in recent years—and gained a reputation for high quality—the island chain accounts for less than 0.0001 percent of the global supply. Put another way: Americans import about 425,000 metric tons of cocoa beans annually, while Hawaii produced just 40 metric tons of cocoa beans in 2021, according to the state's most recent figures.
"So there's no way for us to source this domestically," says Weyandt. Even if there was, the cocoa grown in Hawaii couldn't replicate the taste of beans from Tanzania—or any other place where Xocolatl gets its supplies, from Costa Rica to Peru to Uganda to Nicaragua.
Those imports are now subject to higher taxes, thanks to the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. In early April, the Trump administration slapped a 10 percent tax on just about all imports, including chocolate and cocoa beans. On Thursday, the White House finalized plans for higher, country-specific tariffs that will hit imports from dozens of nations, starting next week. Those new tariffs will target several key cocoa-producing countries, including Costa Rica (15 percent), Côte d`Ivoire (15 percent), Ghana (15 percent), Indonesia (19 percent), and Nicaragua (18 percent).
The National Confectioners Association, an industry group representing chocolatiers and candymakers, says U.S. imports of confectionery, chocolate, and cocoa total about $4.4 billion this year. In addition to providing a wide variety of options to consumers, those imports help support another $2 billion in exports, sales that could be jeopardized by trade disruptions.
"Having a tariff on cocoa is not going to create farm jobs for cocoa farmers in the United States," says Weyandt. "All it's going to do is make it more expensive for American chocolate manufacturers to operate."
Melting Profits
There are a few cocoa trees growing in Hershey, Pennsylvania, though that's well outside their usual climate.
You can find them in the center atrium at Hershey's Chocolate World, right between the bar that serves chocolate lager beer and the Stuff Your Cup attraction, where guests can load up an oversized Reese's Peanut Butter Cup shell from a buffet of candy and chocolate (in case you ever wanted to do that).
You don't have to love chocolate to appreciate Hershey's as a tourist attraction. But you do have to love capitalism. The 2,500 square foot Chocolate World attraction is a giant gift shop/sugar rush that also celebrates the legacy and global dominance of the Hershey's brand. The centerpiece is the faux factory tour with the singing cows. It's an essential detour if you ever find yourself driving across Pennsylvania. If you grew up there, as I did, it was almost certainly a school field trip destination.
The cocoa trees are not a star attraction in this fantasyland of confectionery. But they're there, marked with a small sign that most people probably don't notice on their way to the Great Candy Expedition, whatever that is. That seems fitting. The bounties of capitalism surround us and endlessly compete for our attention. It can be difficult to notice the boring foundations upon which all this has been built—in this case, the cocoa trees. It's the laborious process of growing, tending, and harvesting. It's the system of trade that brings together the beans, the sugar, and all the other ingredients in your favorite candy bar. Along the factory tour, visitors get a few reminders of the complexity of that process. "Did you know? It takes 270 beans to make 1 LB of chocolate," informs one sign. Another display shows where Hershey's gets all those beans: rainforest regions in the Americas, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.
None of that happens for free, and yet it happens so efficiently that Hershey's can afford to hand out a complimentary mini chocolate bar to each and every one of the guests on the factory tour ride.
Elsewhere in the sprawling Hershey's headquarters, however, there are people keeping a keen eye on those costs. Nothing is going to stop the cows from singing, but the Trump administration's tariffs have Hershey's executives delivering a more somber message to the company's investors.
Hershey's, which employs more than 21,000 people worldwide and more than 12,000 in the United States, expects to lose between $15 million and $20 million in the second quarter of this year due to the cost of the tariffs, announced Steve Voskuil, the company's senior vice president and chief financial officer, during an earnings call in early May. "Absent tariff relief, this expense is expected to increase in the third quarter as we work through inventory on hand," he explained. Later, Food Business News reported that Hershey's could be on the hook for around $100 million in tariff costs per quarter if nothing changes.
The sheer size of the Hershey's empire makes the company susceptible to tariffs on both raw materials and its finished goods. Retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada—against American exports, including chocolate bars—were among the company's major worries, Voskuil explained in the earnings call.
But the company's size also gives it some options that don't exist for smaller chocolatiers such as Weyandt. During that call, Hershey's CEO Michele Buck explained that the company would be lobbying the Trump administration for relief from the cocoa tariffs. "Cocoa cannot be grown in the United States and thus, we are engaging with the U.S. government to seek an exemption," she said. "We are developing robust mitigation plans for other raw material and finished goods exposures."
Being able to curry favor with the country's political leaders should not be the difference between earning $10 million in additional profits in the span of three months or having to pay that sum to the U.S. Treasury. Still, it's easy to wish Hershey's well as it tries to undo a tariff policy that's hurting chocolate makers of all sizes and helping seemingly no one—and that arrived at a time when the price of cocoa was already near record highs.
'We Could Spend That Money in Other Ways'
When Weyandt got into the chocolate business a decade ago, he knew that Xocolatl would have to pay more than the global commodity price for cocoa. That's what happens when you're the new guy in the market, when you're running a small shop only buying a few tons of cocoa every year, and when you're committed to buying specialty cocoa that sells above fair trade prices.
Back then, the baseline price for a metric ton of cocoa beans was about $2,000 per ton. Weyandt recalls paying two or three times as much.
Now, he'd love to see prices in that range.
"Our price has gone from $5,000 a ton to over $13,000 a ton over the last two years," Weyandt says. "That is what was happening before the tariffs—and then on top of that, now we have tariffs on a product that cannot be grown in the United States."
Cocoa prices spiked during 2023 and 2024 for a variety of interconnected reasons. Global demand for chocolate has continued to grow, but the supply chains for cocoa beans have been beset by labor shortages and rising transportation costs. An outbreak of disease and a poor growing season across much of West Africa made the problem worse.
Global cocoa prices peaked at more than $13,000 per metric ton in December 2024, according to the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute. Prices have eased during the first half of 2025, but they have remained significantly higher than normal—a bit north of $7,000 per metric ton in mid-July.
Some brands have responded to the rising prices by shrinking product sizes or reducing output, while others are raising retail prices, according to Benjamin Turner, who runs a blog focused on the chocolate industry for Compartés, a Los Angeles–based gourmet chocolatier. "The market size for cocoa beans is forecast to grow by a further $3.58 billion USD between 2024 and 2029," he wrote in April. "The impact is particularly pronounced for artisanal brands."
Daniel Rattigan has been feeling that squeeze, too. As the cofounder of the French Broad Chocolate Factory in Asheville, North Carolina, Rattigan is used to buying between six and eight tons of the stuff at a time from suppliers in Nicaragua, Peru, and Tanzania. He's already stocked up for the rest of this year, in anticipation of the tariffs that could be hitting imports in the second half of 2025—but doing so meant he couldn't wait to see if commodity prices would fall further.
"It's only double what it was [a few years ago] and only double is somehow a good thing," he says.
Because the tariffs are applied as a percentage of the import price, higher commodity prices mean paying more in tariffs, too. If there are higher tariffs imposed later this year, both Rattigan and Weyandt say it will be a challenge to adapt.
At my request, Rattingan ran through some of the numbers for one possible scenario: What if the threatened 18 percent levy on imports from Nicaragua comes into being?
"If we have to bring in another container, we're looking at $80,000, so that's another $14,000 of [tariff] cost," he explains. "That makes it $94,000 for that [shipment]. It increases the cost dramatically."
Weyandt says that Xocolatl has recently increased the price of some of its products in response to the higher cocoa prices and the tariffs. That's unlikely to be the end of it.
"It prohibits us from growing. We could spend that money in other ways," says Weyandt. "We could buy new equipment, we could hire more people, but if our costs are going higher for something that's totally out of our control, then it just limits how we're able to grow as a business."
If You Build It Here, There Will Still Be a Tariff
When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified before the House Appropriations Committee in early June, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D–Penn.) confronted him about a product that has a lot in common with cocoa beans.
"What's the tariff on bananas?" Dean asked Lutnick.
After a bit of back-and-forth about the possible tariff rates on countries that send their bananas to America, Lutnick fell back on the Trump administration's common refrain on tariffs. "If you build in America and you produce your product in America, there will be no tariff," Lutnick said.
Dean pointed out a problem with that plan: "We cannot build bananas in America."
Like cocoa beans, bananas are cheap and widely available in the United States even though they are not grown here (with, again, the limited exception of Hawaii). They are another great success story of global trade, one that too many Americans—including the current occupant of the White House—seem to take for granted.
The facile idea that all commodities and goods consumed by Americans ought to be made or grown in the U.S. is a zero-sum framing of global trade that leaves out a lot of important details. One is that many products made in the United States, from cars to candy bars, depend on inputs produced in foreign countries and subjected to tariffs. Another is that not everything can be made or grown in the United States.
"If the purpose of the tariffs is to reshore domestic manufacturing, then there is no justification for imposing these levies on products that cannot be produced at scale here," says Wayne Winegarden, an economist with the Pacific Research Institute. "No matter how many tariffs the Trump administration imposes, or how high he may jack up the rates, the president will never bring the production of these crops to the U.S."
The same is true for many other agricultural products that grow only in tropical climates, a list that includes not just bananas but many other fresh fruits, as well as coffee and such spices as cinnamon and cardamom. In 2024, the U.S. imported $263 billion of agricultural goods, an all-time record. Some of those products are sold directly to consumers in grocery stores; others are processed into items like chocolate bars. At every step in the process—importing, trucking, stocking, manufacturing, and selling—those imports support American jobs.
Perhaps even more important: They're making your life healthier, and probably more enjoyable.
Tariffs don't only create higher prices for American businesses and consumers. They limit the variety of goods and services available.
For example, Videri Chocolate Factory, a North Carolina-based specialty chocolatier, announced in July that it would no longer operate as a nut-, gluten-, soy-, or egg-free facility, as it had been since 2011, because of rising prices.
"Cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic cost $5,500 per metric ton in 2023. Those same beans cost $13,700 per metric ton in March and then surged to $20,300 by May due to recent tariffs," the company explained in an email to its customers. "These increases have made it increasingly difficult to sustain our current business model."
The loss of an allergen-free chocolate option won't improve American national security or bring jobs back to the Rust Belt. It also won't show up on a spreadsheet tallying the economic losses from the tariffs. But it's a loss just the same. It's one fewer option in the marketplace, and one less little joy in the lives of people who can't eat other kinds of chocolate.
If Trump feels he must impose new trade barriers, he could still exempt any product that cannot be grown in the United States. "The fact that he will not," Winegarden says, "demonstrates that there is little logic behind his tariffs."
"This is just objectively bad policy," adds Weyandt. "It's purely a penalty for American manufacturers."
