Sapporo moves beer production to US after 50% Canada tariff — SkimNews
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- Sapporo announced Monday it will move some beer production from Canada to the U.S. after the Trump administration's tariffs made Canadian manufacturing untenable, with chief strategy officer Rieko Shofu calling the levies "something out of our control."
- Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Canadian alcoholic products including beer and wine last month, escalating an ongoing trade fight between the two countries.
- Canada's retaliatory tariffs on a broad swath of U.S. goods took effect Tuesday, drawing a sharp warning from the Trump administration.
- Sapporo will relocate production of its non-alcoholic beer — currently manufactured in Canada — to the U.S. by the first half of 2027 and is weighing whether to buy or build a brewery on the West Coast.
- Sapporo is Japan's fourth-largest brewer and the producer of the top-selling Asian beer in the U.S., and Shofu told Bloomberg the company has "a lot of momentum" to expand its U.S. market share.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent fired back at Canada at a Breitbart event Tuesday, saying, "If I were the Canadians, I would be careful because they wanted the benefits of being a state without being a state."
Why it matters: Sapporo's decision to reshore rather than absorb the 50% levy gives the first concrete corporate response to Trump's Canada tariffs, with a new West Coast brewery planned and production shifting by mid-2027 — a direct test of whether trade-policy brinkmanship reshapes North American supply chains.
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