Canadian customers are telling US businesses they will stop buying US products.
Grocery chains in Canada are sidelining American products and expecting their sales to drop.
The boycott, in addition to retaliatory tariffs, could have an impact on the US agricultural industry.
Canadian businesses large and small have been turning down American products, starting with non-essentials like alcohol, and spreading toward a wider variety of food products that economic experts say could hit different levels of the agriculture supply chain.
«Basically, overnight, everything changed, maybe irreparably,» said Alisa Gorokhova, a resident of Quebec, as she recalled the morning after the tariff announcements came for the first time. «There’s suddenly ‘made in Canada’ labels on things and American booze is gone from the shelves.»
Gorokhova said she now sees shoppers actively checking where everything is made, taking the task of boycotting US products seriously.
The increasing animosity Canadians are showing toward American products comes after Trump repeatedly imposed and paused a 25% tariff on Canadian exports, and most recently slapped a 25% tax on Canadian steel and aluminum. Trump also talks often about his desire to make Canada the 51st state of the US and called Justin Trudeau, Canada’s now-former prime minister, the «governor.»
As a result, American businesses are feeling the pinch. Ethan Frisch, CEO and founder of Burlap & Barrel, a public benefit corporation based in New York that specializes in fairly sourced single origin spices, said that he has been receiving emails from Canadian customers he had a long relationship with saying they will no longer purchase his products because of the boycott.
«We’re not really sure how to handle this,» said Frisch. «We as individuals at Burlap & Barrel did not vote to put Trump in office and we do import some spices from Canada as well, so our supply chain is very intertwined with the whole tariff situation.»
«All this could force us to buy less from our partners by introducing an extra level of risk, which really contradicts our mission of putting more money into the pockets of smaller farmers,» he added.
Large grocery chains across Canada are also spotlighting local products in response to patriotic sentiments.
Take Sobeys Inc., Canada’s second-largest national food retailer with approximately 1,600 stores across ten provinces. A spokesperson of its parent company, Empire Company Limited, told Business Insider that over the past year, around 12% of their sales came from products sourced in the US, but given their work to «find alternatives to US sources over the past 30 days, that number is expected to decrease.»
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