Trump's War on Chocolate

AMERICAN CHOCOLATIERS NEED IMPORTS, AND TARIFFS HELP NO ONE.

- ERIC BOEHM

I DIDN'T EXPECT economic insights from an animatronic cow.

In the Disney-style ride at Hershey headquarters that lays out the company's chocolate mythos, the singing, dancing cattle are mostly there to underline the milk in milk chocolate. They also set the scene, explaining why the world's best-known chocolate company was founded here amid the hilly pastures of central Pennsylvania. Many of those pastures contain cows, cows make milk, and back in the 1890s, it was easier to bring cocoa beans and sugar to the milk than the other way around.

But there was something unexpectedly evocative in the ditty that played throughout the ride: "Wherever you go, no matter how far/You'll always see a Hershey bar."

Human beings have been eating chocolate for centuries, but chocolate didn't really become chocolate—the sweet, affordable, and ubiquitous treat—until Milton Hershey and his successors figured out how to assemble a supply chain that stretches across oceans and merge it with American manufacturing expertise. Thanks to assembly lines and economic efficiency, chocolate is within the reach of nearly every human being on the planet.

It's hard to imagine a company like Hershey existing anywhere except in the U.S., but the key ingredient in its most famous products barely exists here in its raw form. The world's supply of chocolate depends on the global trade of cocoa beans, which are grown exclusively in equatorial climates across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The United States produces more chocolate than any other country in the world, but there would be no American chocolate-making businesses, large or small, without imports.

A lot of American manufacturing is like that too: U.S.-based businesses rely on imported raw materials when making everything from candy bars to new cars. Policies that make those inputs more expensive or difficult to obtain—policies such as the Trump administration's tariffs—are leaving a bitter taste.