In an article published today about outdoor industry news, SNEWS interviewed Cusa Tea founder, Jim Lamancusa, about the impact of recent tariffs on our small American business.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
"Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for alternative to China, including bringing your products home and making your products in the USA," Trump wrote in his Friday series. Then this weekend, Trump backed off his own threats.
In testimony to the United States Trade Representative, outdoor companies have repeatedly expressed how complex it is to change their supply chains. It can't happen overnight or even in a few weeks. Some companies, like Hestra, were already in the process of transitioning out of China and others are now considering moving.
For other companies, like Boulder-based Cusa Tea, it's impossible. "We have worked in tandem with an amazing botanical extraction company to modify their technology and use it to make the only instant tea product that actually tastes better than loose leaf tea," Owner Jim Lamancusa said. "We have deep relationships with organic tea farmers that have been built over many years and tea isn’t native to America even if we did want to grow it here. We just don’t have the ideal climate for tea growing.
Lamancusa continued, "Lumping all companies into one bucket is very disappointing to hear from this administration. I recognize that this is a very complicated issue, but what I see as a result at this point is that these policies are leading us into a global recession and making the world less connected. We are now a global economy and these policies are threatening to create a more ethnocentric and dangerous planet."
Read the full article.
