Fresh Press Farms grows all the olives, seeds and nuts it uses to make cooking oils on American farms. It presses them at its own mill in Georgia, then bottles the oil and distributes it to grocery stores across the country.
In theory, it's just the type of company that President Donald Trump's America First agenda is
But the glass bottles it uses to package products are sourced from other countries, including China, which is facing tariffs as high as 145%. The aluminum for other containers, which are made in the U.S., comes from Canada.
CEO Frédéric Lebourg is looking for alternative suppliers for the glass bottles, but said
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"It's easy to say that it's going to bring more development in the U.S., and it may in the long term," Lebourg said in an interview, referring to the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump has announced on many of the biggest U.S. trading partners. "But short term it's going to be incredibly painful and force people like us to give up an investment project."
While the White House and the world's financial markets are focused on tariff negotiations with the scores of countries caught up in Trump's trade war,
Like Fresh Press Farms, some are putting hiring and expansion plans on hold while they come up with short-term plans to cope with the tariffs. Others are figuring out how tariffs apply along their entire supply chain, with raw materials and finished goods subject to different rates. Then they have to decide whether those costs should be passed on to customers.
All in all, it's taking up a lot of working hours.
"It's incredibly onerous," said Bob King, the CEO of New York-based Humanscale, which designs ergonomic chairs, desks and lamps. "So many of our operations people now are focused on tariffs."
Working out the potential tariffs on an office chair, for example, can get complicated fast, said King. With production facilities both in the U.S. and overseas, Humanscale must first account for the raw materials — mostly aluminum and steel — used to construct individual parts of the chair, breaking down the percentage of each one to calculate the duty. Its current systems weren't designed to run those processes, he said, and ensuring compliance is laborious.
Even after final assembly of the product, there could still be additional tariffs if it's being shipped somewhere like Canada, stacking layers of duties on top of one another.
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Humanscale had already been shifting its supply chain to cut its exposure to China, but some of that investment will still get caught up in the tariff dragnet.
"You can't just change supply chains like that," King said. "It takes years."
The White House has insisted that temporary disruptions as companies adjust to the tariffs will eventually give way to stronger growth, promising a Golden Age of American investment and manufacturing.
"You need to see the entire picture and as President Trump said the other day — stay cool," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg Television on Monday.
In the near term, the burden on businesses is stoking warnings that the U.S. may fall into a recession.
U.S. factory activity
The World Trade Organization has slashed its outlook for merchandise trade: it now expects volume to decline by 0.2% in 2025, almost three percentage points lower than it would have been without the trade war.
The scale of the disruptions are playing out in real time, even for some of the biggest U.S. companies: China has ordered its airlines not to take any further deliveries of Boeing Co. jets; while Apple Inc. dodged its biggest crisis since the pandemic after Trump exempted many popular consumer electronics from tariffs on goods from China.
Vizion, a tech company that gathers supply-chain data, estimates that imports into the U.S. — measured in volume of bookings — fell by as much as 64% in the week of April 1-8 from a week earlier.
For Trivium Packaging, a manufacturer of steel and aluminum containers for everything from canned foods to aerosol sunscreens, the tariffs have caused an immediate and rapid increase in costs for their main raw materials. The steel it uses to make 3 billion tin cans in the U.S. each year is all imported, said Rob Huffman, president of the company's global aerosols and beverage business. So are the aluminum ingots that are a crucial component of aerosol cans.
"Even if we wanted to buy domestically, we can't because they don't make what we need to make our product," said Huffman, who's based in Ohio. The company has been trying for years to get domestic steel producers to ramp up their production of tin plate, he said, but factories tend to be focused on making steel for cars and construction.
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In the meantime, Trivium has invested more than $400 million in its U.S. production facilities over the past decade, leaving it with machines that rely on the imported tin plate.
Trivium has shelved any expansion plans in the US for now, and the only hiring happening at its five U.S. plants is to fill in staff losses due to attrition. Like at Humanscale, much of workers' time is taken up figuring out the immediate changes needed to comply with tariffs.
"It's like triage costs, but the game changes every day," Huffman said. "What you thought was the right answer the day before may not be the right answer tomorrow."
At Fresh Press Farms, CEO Lebourg is wary of raising prices despite a huge increase in costs. The company mostly sells its products through grocery stores, he said, where price changes often don't get reflected for months. Lebourg is concerned that by the time the higher prices show up on shelves, the trade war may already have moderated.
"I will be the most expensive brand in the market and I won't sell anything," he said.
