Key takeaways:
- Chocolate is emerging as an early warning signal for US–Canada trade breakdown, with manufacturers redesigning supply chains ahead of any political reset.
- Lindt’s 2025 decision to explore supplying Canada from Europe marked a turning point, showing how tariffs are already reshaping food manufacturing in practical, irreversible ways.
- With the USMCA/CUSMA review still months away, food companies are locking in sourcing, pricing and capacity decisions now, treating trade uncertainty as a structural cost rather than a temporary disruption.
By January, the most telling shifts in North American food trade aren’t being announced with fanfare. They aren’t dramatic or especially loud either. They’re happening quietly, decision by decision, contract by contract. Chocolate happens to sit at the center of it - not because it’s special, but because it touches so many parts of the system at once, from global commodity markets to premium pricing and cross-border production. When chocolate supply starts to move, it rarely moves on its own.
That became apparent in early March 2025, when Lindt & Sprüngli said it was exploring plans to stop supplying Canada from its US factories in order to avoid tariffs. It wasn’t framed as a strategic overhaul, but as an option on the table - a way to reduce exposure while trade conditions remained unresolved. Lindt positioned the move as contingency planning, not retreat. With some distance, it now looks more like an admission that old assumptions about North American trade no longer hold.
In a year crowded with tariff rhetoric, Lindt’s move was one of the few moments in 2025 when trade friction visibly reshaped a major food company’s supply chain and it became one of the most closely watched industry stories of the year.
The trigger was the escalation of tariffs between the US and Canada. After Donald Trump authorized 25% duties on imports from Canada and Mexico, Ottawa responded with retaliatory measures under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What mattered most wasn’t the headline rate, but the mechanism. These tariffs were imposed through executive action. They came with no expiry date and no automatic unwind.
Through much of 2025, many food companies assumed the situation would be temporary. Tariffs were treated as an irritation to be modeled around, not a condition to be designed for. By early 2026, that confidence had thinned. With no reset in sight, uncertainty itself started shaping behavior.
Chocolate has been among the first categories to respond because it has little tolerance for prolonged instability. It’s both a finished product and a core input, embedded across a wide range of indulgent foods. When its supply chain shifts, the effects tend to travel.
From integration to insulation
Lindt’s footprint shows why. Around 95% of the chocolate it sells in the US is produced domestically, across five factories that have also historically supplied Canada. For years, roughly half of Lindt products sold north of the border came from those US plants, with the balance sourced from Europe.
After its March 2025 announcement, Lindt said those US-to-Canada volumes would be supplied entirely from Europe, with a transition expected to begin by mid-2025. Speaking after the company’s full-year results, CEO Adalbert Lechner made it clear that Canada remains one of Lindt’s top 10 global markets, and that protecting the business from tariff exposure was non-negotiable.
The logic was practical rather than political. In a tariff environment, predictability matters more than geography. Europe offers Lindt scale, established cocoa processing capacity and a clearer framework for supplying multiple markets without penalty. US factories, despite their size, carry more risk when cross-border flows are penalized.
That calculation isn’t unique to chocolate. North American food manufacturing has long been built around integration - shared capacity, shared inputs, shared markets. Tariffs disrupt that model. Even relatively small volume shifts can weaken utilization, raise costs and strain facilities designed to serve more than one country.
Chocolate is also feeling pressure from the raw materials side. Cocoa costs have climbed sharply over the past two years, driven by poor harvests and supply disruption that hasn’t yet eased. Despite that pressure, Lindt pushed through price increases of more than 6% in 2024 and still delivered growth - a reminder that premium chocolate has retained pricing power even as input costs have grown more volatile. Pricing power, however, doesn’t eliminate operational risk. Tariffs layered onto unstable input costs narrow the margin for error fast.
Once companies start rerouting supply to manage that risk, those routes tend to stick. Even if trade conditions improve later, reversing course is rarely simple or cheap.
A review, not a reset
The next point on the calendar is the scheduled mid-2026 review of CUSMA (Canada-US-Mexico agreement), known in the US as USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada agreement). In theory, it’s meant to take stock of how the agreement is functioning.
A CUSMA review can confirm the status quo just as easily as it can lead to change. It can stretch into protracted negotiations or result in incremental tweaks rather than meaningful relief. With tariffs now tied into wider industrial and political strategies, there’s no guarantee the review delivers clarity.
For manufacturers, the issue is timing. By January 2026, the review is close enough to be factored in, but too distant to plan around. Ingredient contracts are already being signed. Packaging and logistics agreements are being finalized. Decisions about capacity for the next cycle are no longer theoretical - they’re happening now. Waiting until mid-year would mean betting on an outcome that may never arrive.
As a result, adjustment is happening in small, cumulative steps. Inventory buffers are growing. Dual sourcing is becoming routine. Marginal volumes are being redirected to regions with fewer trade variables. In some cases, product architecture is being revisited to limit exposure to tariff-sensitive inputs. None of this makes headlines on its own. Together, it reshapes the system.
Chocolate’s role as an early mover is telling. Its combination of high value, global sourcing and broad downstream use makes it sensitive to trade friction in ways other categories may only feel later.
A signal worth watching
It would be wrong to dismiss Lindt’s move as a premium-brand anomaly. What it reflects is a broader shift in how food companies think about risk. After years of disruption - pandemics, climate volatility, inflation - tolerance for open-ended uncertainty has worn thin.
Tariffs are a particularly difficult variable. They’re political, uneven and capable of shifting faster than supply chains can adapt. Designing around them isn’t a statement of intent. It’s a hedge.
Chocolate is front-running US-Canada trade breakdown because it has to. Its supply chain is global, its inputs volatile and its exposure wide. Other categories may follow more slowly, but the logic is the same. Once companies stop treating North America as a single, predictable production zone, old assumptions start to give way. The shift is subtle at first, but it adds up. By the time policymakers return to the issue in earnest, many of the decisions that matter most may already be settled - which factories serve which markets, where risk is carried and how costs ultimately show up in food prices.
What emerges looks less like a sudden break and more like a slow adjustment made in anticipation of one. That’s the shift taking hold as 2026 begins. Chocolate isn’t forecasting failure. It’s moving ahead of it.
