Donald Trump's fentanyl tariffs hurt Canadian coffee producers' exports to the U.S.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Canadians love their coffee. And despite a chilly climate that makes growing beans here impossible, Canadians love exporting roasted coffee, too. In 2024, Canada shipped a record $860-million worth of coffee, tea and spices to the U.S., up more than 43 per cent from 2019.
Then along came U.S. President Donald Trump, who doesn’t much like coffee or imports from Canada.
The broad-based and ultimately doomed tariffs that Trump slapped on goods from Canada in March, 2025, known as the fentanyl tariffs, devastated Canada’s southbound caffeine flow.
While the U.S. carved out an exemption for goods that met country-of-origin rules under the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, that didn’t apply to roasted coffee beans, since they’re imported in their raw form from countries within the so-called “bean belt” along the equator. So with Canadian java saddled with steep tariffs, U.S. demand evaporated. As of February, the last month for which trade data was available, exports to the U.S. were down roughly 40 per cent from the same month a year earlier.
February also saw the U.S. Supreme Court slap down Trump’s fentanyl tariffs. But the damage was done. By then, shipments of coffee, tea and spices from Canada had generated the 12th-largest haul for the U.S. government among all Canadian imports, an unfortunate list dominated by industrial products like vehicles, steel and machinery.
The question now is whether Canada’s coffee exporters – a group largely made up of private-label coffee makers, coffee pod manufacturers and independent producers – can rebuild their sales to the U.S. That effort faces a strong headwind: Coffee prices have skyrocketed in recent months, partly due to climate-related supply shortages, but also because of tariffs.
Indeed, last fall Trump crumbled under protests from consumers about skyrocketing food prices, and carved out exemptions for imports of beef, coffee, tomatoes and other items. Despite that, U.S. trade data shows duties on Canadian coffee were still rolling into Washington’s coffers this spring, a possible lag as traders and customs officials scramble to keep up with Trump’s trade policy chaos.