What Trump’s Tariffs Mean for Canned Soup

0:00So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

0:44Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:27Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:32Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. This is a can of Campbell's soup. I brought a prop. Look at that. Let me have you introduce yourself. I'm Sean Donnan. I write about the U.S. and global economies from Washington. What do you have with you? A can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup. That I bought from 7-Eleven. For a few months now, I've been obsessed with a little episode that happened in March of 2018 when Wilbur Ross, the then Commerce Secretary, went on TV and held up a can of that very same soup. Well, I just bought this can today out of 7-Eleven down here, and the price was$1.99.

2:23This is, as you've written, Sean, a mostly forgotten footnote of President Trump's first term. You have Wilbur Ross on CNBC the day after the president announced what were some of his first tariffs, 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel. He was out there doing some damage control. Yeah. So the markets were having conniptions about tariffs. So Wilbur Ross, someone who came from Wall Street, former banker and a billionaire, he held up that can of soup to try and say, look, guys, it's not going to be that big a deal. In the can of Campbell's soup, there's about 2.6 cents, 2.6 pennies worth of steel.

3:00So if that goes up by 25%, that's about six-tenths of one cent on the price of a can of Campbell's soup. So who in the world is going to be too bothered by six-tenths of a cent? It was a slightly weird episode, a billionaire holding up a can of soup. But then there were also promises that Wilbur Ross made that day. There's going to be tens of thousands of jobs. There are going to be hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. And all of that is going to mean that these tariffs are going to be good for the U.S. economy. Today in Trump's second term, tariffs on imported steel are twice what they were back then, 50%.

3:43And since last year's sweeping IEPA tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court, The administration has taken another run at building up the U.S.'s tariff wall using Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. So tariffs are a tool and a threat that this administration keeps using. Just this week, we've got this 50 percent tariff that President Trump had threatened on Canadian goods, including hockey sticks. That has prompted negotiations. We may or we may not get a deal that may or may not lower some tariffs. We're waiting to see how that turns out. But we are eight years really into this tariff experiment in the U.S.

4:21economy. And we're at a point now where we can start to really kind of figure out what has actually happened, right? Well, that can of chicken noodle soup that Wilbur brought for$1.99, I went out to my local 7-Eleven and it cost me$3.49. Okay, so that's gone up. And so I was trying to figure out, well, okay, so what actually happened to the tin can? Is this good for the tin can industry?

4:51I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, we unpack how tariffs on tin plate steel reverberated from the White House to a steel town in West Virginia to a multi-generational tomato farm in Indiana. Plus, how those tariffs raised what consumers pay for canned food without lifting the steel industry.

5:16I don't know if you ought to put this on a podcast, Rob. I always say this. The can itself is not a sexy package. Robert Gatz is the vice president and general manager at Can Corporation of America. But there is still value in the can. In its plant outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Can Corp. produces almost a billion tin cans a year. Robert is pretty used to people taking cans for granted. But he says that for food security and in times of crisis, you've got to have canned foods. Inventories need to be at a certain level. If you think back to COVID time frame, you go into the grocery store during COVID, everything was gone.

5:56And what were the first two things gone? Toilet paper and canned goods. Sean, you effectively did an in-depth fact check of what Wilbur Ross said on television. You interrogated this kind of core belief that these tariffs could create manufacturing jobs while raising prices only imperceptibly. And to do that, you started with the makers of the cans themselves, like CanCorp. And, you know, these tend to be regional operations. Why is that? If you are shipping unfilled tin cans, you are basically shipping air. And that does not make sense economically. So what you tend to see is that can makers are spotted around the United States, and they are generally close to the canneries and the farmers who feed fruit and vegetables into those canneries so that you are not shipping empty cans too far.

6:51It makes sense to ship a coil of steel that has a huge amount of value in it, and you can pack them into a container, and that all makes sense. What it does not make sense to do is to ship an empty tin can. And Robert Gatz showed you around CanCorp. Could you describe it? Sure. So the Can Corporation of America, which was created in the 1970s, the immigrant family that founded it had a business growing mushrooms. and they were fed up with the quality of the cans that they were getting. So they decided that they were going to set up their own can company. There's 350 or so employees. And what you see is these enormous coils of steel that come in and they go through this amazing production process where they first get turned into tubes and then they're inserting wrinkles in the tubes, those kind of wavelets that you see in the side of a tin can that give it kind of structure and firmness.

7:47They're putting coatings on it depending on what's going to go inside. Those billion cans that they turn out a year come in 200 different sizes. But it all starts with that cost of steel and those steel coils that come in. And when I was there, there were coils of steel from Germany next to coils of steel from Ohio, all coming together in this factory in Swing State, Pennsylvania. You've written that this is a specific kind of steel. It's tin plate. It's steel rolled out with a thin layer of food-safe tin. Have can makers like CanCorp traditionally sourced this from the U.S., or have they been getting it from overseas?

8:25So if you want to talk about tin plate and tin cans, we can go all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. He identified the production of tin plate as a national priority. You go up to the McKinley era. The McKinley tariffs of 1890 were largely about tin plate, about protecting the industry in the United States. and you have the growth of some great big blast furnaces here in the U.S. on the back of that. In today's world, tin plate is actually a tiny part of the steel market. Steel makers get much more of their profits and their revenues from making steel for the auto industry or for construction.

9:06and the consumption of tin plate in the United States is only around 1 % of the total market. And that gets to be kind of very important as you think about tariffs, what it makes sense to put tariffs on, what it makes sense for big industries to invest in. I wonder, Sean, if imposing these tariffs did help encourage domestic production of this kind of steel in any way. So the answer is it did not. On the day that Wilbur Ross went on TV, there were a dozen steel mills in the United States that were turning out tin plate. Can makers imported roughly 50 % of the steel that they used to make cans in America.

9:51Today, there are three active steel mills in the United States that turn out tin plate. and can makers will tell you that they import 80 % of the steel that they use to make tin cans. Sean, so there's this paradox, it seems. You have tariffs put in place supposedly to create an incentive to make U.S. producers of things like tin plate more competitive with foreign suppliers. Why aren't U.S. manufacturers jumping back into the tin plate manufacturing business? A lot of foreign producers have become just better at producing tin plate. They've invested more in it. They have more modern steel mills.

10:29And there's been a very clear decision by the steel industry not to invest in tinplate production. Now, they will tell you that that is partly because of foreign competition and that they have in the past sought higher tariffs still on imported tinplate. But people in the industry will also say, well, yeah, that's true. But part of the story here is also decades of underinvestment in a lot of these steel mills, which means that they just aren't competitive at turning out tin plate. And tin plate is a tiny part of the market. You know, why would we allocate a lot of capital to that? You steered your car from outside of Allentown to West Virginia to a now shuttered mill to go to one of these mill towns where historically they've produced this tin plate steel.

11:19And they told you making tin plate is not worth the investment even with these new tariff protections. What was the situation there? Yeah, so Weirton, West Virginia, which is really only about half an hour, 40 minutes from Pittsburgh, is a town that was literally created around a steel mill. A guy called Ernest Weir moved there in the early 20th century, set up this mill. And at one point in the 20th century, this was one of the largest, if not the largest, tin plate mill in the United States. They did all sorts of other steel there as well, but tin plate was a big part of it. That Campbell's soup can, the steel for it, used to come from Weirton, among other places.

12:00At one point in the early 70s, 14 ,000 people worked in the Weirton steel mill. In 2024, Cleveland Cliffs, the current owners, shut down the tin mill there. The head of the United Steelworkers local there said he thought it needed about$300 million in investment just to get back up and running and be competitive. And that was the last part of the mill to be shut down. And more than 900 people lost their jobs. And as a result, America lost what had been a pretty big domestic producer. And, you know, 900 jobs doesn't feel like a lot when you're looking at the aggregate numbers for the U.S. economy.

12:39but in a small town in West Virginia when that company that employs those 900 people is the largest taxpayer in the community when pretty much everyone you talk to has either worked in the mill or had a relative who worked in the mill going back for more than a century it means losing your main economic engine but also a huge player in your community.

13:12After the break, what tin plate tariffs mean for farmers, for canners and consumers, and for the Trump administration.

13:24Quick one before you jump back in. You're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.

14:18I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

14:52Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

15:33Y 'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:07I call it three different waves. Back at CanCorp, which relies increasingly on imported tin plate, Robert Gatz watched as tariffs made imported steel more expensive. So there was a first wave of 25 percent, and then there was also IEPA tariffs, and then the additional 25 percent tariffs. That's where everything really started to get very tough as far as your conversations with customers. Robert says can makers traditionally lock in their steel prices on one-year contracts. And at the end of a year, they tell their own customers what their empty cans will cost in the coming year. But with that last year in 2025, we actually had to go back and do two different price increases to our customers because of those tariff impacts, which actually happened immediate.

16:52it. Sean, you looked at how tariffs on imported steel got passed down to CanCorp's customers, starting with this three-generation family farm in Indiana. What did you learn? So, if you talk to Glenn Abbott, who is the current farmer in charge of Abbott Farms, it was set up by his father in the 1960s, he will tell you that one of the best decisions his dad ever made was in 1982 to start growing tomatoes and sell them to canneries. And the reason for that is, in the kind of unpredictable world that farmers inhabit, tomatoes and selling them under contract to a cannery is a steady source of income.

17:39You know what you're going to get paid. This year they are planting 465, or they have planted 465 acres of tomatoes. That's less than 10 % of the 8 ,000 acres that they have at the farm there. That will generate 40 % of their revenues. The family sells to a canner called Red Gold, which recently started buying fewer of the Abbott's tomatoes. Why is that? Red Gold is paying more for cans today, 17 % more for cans today than it was last year. And as a result, it's had to adjust. It also is facing increasing competition from overseas producers. One of the quirks in the current tariff regime is that tin plate has a 50 % tariff on it.

18:25But if that tin plate is in a can that is already filled with peaches or tomatoes or beans that comes in from China or Europe or North Africa, it is not subject to the same tariffs. And therefore, that steel is coming in essentially duty-free. And that creates competition for the domestic supply chain in terms of cans. The consequence for Glenn Abbott is that he is growing 10 fewer acres of tomatoes than he was last year. They're sitting at roughly 465 acres of tomatoes, which is significantly below the 600 acres that he really needs to grow to really fully maximize revenues. CanCorp and others in the supply chain have looked to the White House for some relief.

19:13Sean, how's that gone? So, they have spent a lot of time visiting Washington, making their case. And what you hear over and over again is they've gotten a lot of sympathy, but they've gotten absolutely no relief. So, they've kind of given up on the idea that this 50 % tariff on imported tin plate and the higher costs that are associated with that are going to go away. And what they've done is what a lot of industries who face tariffs do. they've turned their case against tariffs into one now for new tariffs. So, Sean, the producers effectively want to add the steel tariffs to the imported canned foods that are undercutting their own products, which would add more price pressure for people buying canned foods.

19:57Your reporting showed that canned food prices have been outstripping food prices in general, with canned foods up nearly 50 percent since March of 2018, and that's compared to about 34 percent for all food in the home. Yeah. The price of that can, of an empty can, is up almost 80 % since 2018. And we see it very clearly on the supermarket shelves in terms of higher prices for canned goods, you know, which also affects a lot of lower income families who are more reliant on canned foods, which are typically cheaper than fresh foods, and see their bills go up as a result of it. Now, we reached out to the White House and Kush Desai, who's a spokesman for the president, says, well, you can't blame the tariffs.

20:47This is all about Biden administration and inflation that we inherited. And there's some truth to that. You know, the vegetables are more expensive. Everything's more expensive. We know that. But the price of canned foods has gone up significantly more than the price of all other foods. and economists are pretty clear in pointing to that discrepancy and saying there's one big reason for that, and that's the steel tariffs. Is there any indication that President Trump and his White House are adjusting course based on feedback they've gotten from the last eight years of tariffs? I think it's really important to remember the initial promise that was attached to tariffs, and that was factory jobs, essentially.

21:30The whole case for the tariffs was built on the deindustrialization that we saw in a lot of towns and industrial cities in America. It was built on this idea of the China shock, that China's entry into the global markets had essentially devastated the U.S. manufacturing industry, and the tariffs would help rebuild industry. People do not like these tariffs, poll after poll tells us, because they associate them with higher prices. But if there's a trade-off and the payoff is more factory jobs, then I think a lot of people, and polls show this as well, kind of buy into that idea. We're willing to pay a little bit more if that means more Americans working in more American factories.

22:14But you don't have that yet. We have seen investment in some mills in new production, but what we haven't seen is a lot of jobs. There are about 1 ,300 more people working in U.S. steel mills today than were in 2018. That's in a labor market of 170 million people here in the United States. And in fact, since President Trump returned to the White House in January of 2025, the U.S. has lost 75 ,000 manufacturing jobs. And so the big promise of bringing back factory jobs to America so far is an unfulfilled promise. You know, the White House will tell you it's too early. They will point to other numbers like industrial production numbers, manufacturing hours worked, things like that that show that there's more going on in the factories that we have.

23:08And you did find a bit of a silver lining in that West Virginia mill town where 900 people found themselves out of work when that mill shut down. Yeah. There is a new kind of economic engine in town, and that's a battery startup called Form Energy. And they now employ 400 people. They have a factory that turns out these big batteries that are for use by utilities and data centers and so on. And there's a lot of people who were laid off from the steel mill who now work at Form Energy. And that could be a future path. But when you talk to Dean Harris, the mayor, who himself worked for 48 years in the Weirton Steel Mill, he will tell you that, you know, steel is what got us here, but it's not our future.

23:54You got Wilbur Ross on the phone this summer. Asked him about that moment back in 2018 and about how he's watched the president's terrorist policies unfold. What did he tell you? He was down in Palm Beach. He is retired now. He believes that a lot of what we've seen play out as a result of other things that have gone on in the economy. He pointed to inflation and so on as reasons why the cost of cans had gone up more than he predicted. but he also had this kind of I think it's the closest I've heard to a kind of contrite statement from anyone who served in the Trump administration about tariffs he said quote one thing it proves is that tariffs don't necessarily solve every problem the world has and that I think will always be true

24:56This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gurra. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

25:25Before you sign off, you tuned in for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered contexts into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

26:05Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:53Download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.