Tea tariffs once sparked a revolution. Now they are creating angst
[November 24, 2025] By
MATT SEDENSKY
NEW YORK (AP) — A tax on tea once sparked rebellion. This time, it’s
just causing headaches.
Importers of the prized leaves have watched costs climb, orders stall
and margins shrink under the weight of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Now, even after Trump has given them a reprieve, tea traders say it
won’t immediately undo the damage.
“It took a while to work its way through the system, these tariffs, and
it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system,” says
Bruce Richardson, a celebrated tea master, tea historian and purveyor of
teas at his shop, Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, in Danville, Kentucky. “That
tariffed tea is still working its way out of our warehouses.”
While a handful of bigger firms are behind the biggest supermarket
brands, the premium tea market is largely the work of smaller
businesses, from family farms to specialty importers to a web of little
tea shops, tea rooms and tea cafes across the U.S. Amid an onslaught of
tariffs, they have become showcases for the levies’ effects.
On their shelves, selection has narrowed, with some teas now missing
because they’re no longer viable products to stock with steep levies on
top. In their warehouses, managers are consumed with uncertainty and
operational headaches, including calculating what a blend really costs,
with ingredients from multiple countries on a roller coaster of tariffs.
And in backrooms where the wafting scent of fresh tea permeates, owners
have been forced to put off job postings, raises, advertising and other
investments so they can have cash available to pay duties when their
containers arrive at U.S. ports.
“If I were to add up all the money I’ve spent on tariffs that weren’t
there a year ago, it could equal a new employee,” says Hartley Johnson,
who owns the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company in Acton, Massachusetts.
Johnson’s prices used to stay static for a year or longer. He ate the
tariff costs before being forced to respond. His most popular tea, a
smoky Taiwanese one called Hu-Kwa, has steadily risen from $26 to $46 a
pound.
He knows some customers are reconsidering.
“Where is that tipping point?” Johnson asks. “I’m kind of finding that
tipping point is happening now.”
Though Trump backed off some tariffs on agricultural products last week,
many in the tea trade are wary of celebrating too soon and caution tea
drinkers shouldn’t either. Much of next year’s supply has already been
imported and tariffed and the full impact of those duties may not have
fully spilled downhill.
Meantime, other tariff-driven price hikes persist. All sorts of other
products tea businesses import, from teapots to infusers, remain subject
to levies, and costs for some American-made items, like tins for
packaging, have spiked because they rely on foreign materials.
“The canisters, the bamboo boxes, the matcha whisks, everything that we
import, everything that we sell has been affected by tariffs,” says
Gilbert Tsang, owner of MEM Tea Imports in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Though globally, tea reigns supreme, imbibed more than anything but
water, it has long been overshadowed by coffee in the U.S. Still, tea is
entwined in American history from the very beginning, even before
colonists angry with tariffs dumped tons of it in Boston Harbor.
[to top of second column] |
 Boston may run on Dunkin’ today, but
it was born on tea.
The 1773 revolt that became known as the Boston Tea Party rose out
of the British Parliament’s implementation of tea tariffs on
colonists, who rejected taxation without representation in
government. After an independent United States was born, one of the
new government’s first major acts, the Tariff Act of 1789,
ironically set in law import taxes on a range of products including
tea. In time, though, trade policy came to include carve-outs for
many products Americans rely on but don’t produce.
For more than 150 years, most tea has passed through U.S. ports with
little to no duties.
That began to change in Trump’s first term with his hardline
approach to China. But nothing compared to what came with his return
to the White House.
In July, the most recent month for which the U.S. International
Trade Commission has tallied tariff numbers, tea was taxed at an
average rate of over 12%, a huge increase from a year earlier when
it was just under one-tenth of a percent. In that single month,
American businesses and consumers paid more than $6 million in tea
import taxes, amassing in just 31 days more tariffs than any
previous full year on record.
“All over again, taxation without representation,” says Richardson,
an adviser to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. “Our wants and
needs and our voices are not being represented because Congress is
avoiding the issue by simply allowing the president to act like
George III.”
All told, tea importers paid about $19.6 million in tariffs in the
first seven months of 2025, nearly seven times as much as the same
period last year.
It’s all been confounding to those steeped in the world of tea, on
which the U.S. depends on foreign countries for nearly all of the
billions of pounds Americans brew each year. Though a number of
small tea farms exist in the U.S., they can’t fill Americans’ cups
for more than a few hours of the year.
“We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight,” says
Angela McDonald, president of the United States League of Tea
Growers.
Trump’s suspension of tea tariffs came too late for some businesses,
including Los Angeles-based International Tea Importers Inc., for
which tariffs created an untenable cash-flow crunch.
“We just became over-leveraged financing not just the inventory, but
also the tariffs,” says the company’s CEO, Brendan Shah.
Tariffs weren’t the only thing the 35-year-old business was facing,
but without them, Shah says it may have survived.
“Unpredictable tariff policies,” he wrote to customers in announcing
the company’s closure, “have created the final, insurmountable
barrier.”
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