Trump’s Tariffs Slow America’s Access to Canada’s Cheese

Cheese nerds are an excitable bunch. These days, if you want to see them get superexcited, just mention Canada.

Their eyes will light up as they tell you about the haul of gold, silver and bronze medals Canadian cheesemakers took home from the American Cheese Society awards in 2024 and 2025, including best-in-show honors two years in a row.

They may swoon over the organic operation at Fromagerie La Station in Compton, Quebec, where animal welfare is taken so seriously that the 150 milking cows rest on water beds after grazing in rolling Appalachian foothills 100 miles east of Montreal. They may chuckle as they talk about idiosyncratic characters like Jean Morin, the cheesemaker at Fromagerie du Presbytère, who converted a historic church into an aging cave where the wheels are turned by robots and who helped set a Guinness World Record for the largest serving of poutine. (It weighed more than three tons.)

Most exciting of all, they’ll tell you, is that these products and others are now for sale in the United States, many of them for the first time. “Some of these cheeses are as good as any in the world,” said Brad Dubé, who imports and distributes several through his Brooklyn-based firm, Food Matters Again.

Then, if you want to see how quickly excitement can change to a different emotion, ask about tariffs.

The 50 percent tariffs that President Trump slapped on Canadian cheese last month have caused havoc up and down the supply chain. Mongers and customers have had to cool their budding romance with Canadian cheese just as it was starting to get interesting. Makers who had been eyeing the new enthusiasm for their products from south of the border have put their plans on hold.

Some who were exporting already are not shipping anything right now. Like their American trading partners and retailers, they are hoping the tariffs are scaled back. While they wait, all of them are taking a hard look at how far they are willing to trim their margins.

“It’s immediately had an impact,” Mr. Dubé said. The momentum had been “quite real,” he said, but fizzled out on the news of the tariffs. “I have seen the downturn in my sales.”

The United States imports far less cheese from Canada than it does from Italy and France. Before crossing the border, Canadian cheese must pass through a thicket of quotas and regulatory paperwork. Until recently, most small-scale producers found the work too much to handle.

Simply sending a Canadian cheese to the American Cheese Society awards is an ordeal. Aspiring contestants have been turned back at the border. Since 2023, staff and volunteers at the University of Guelph in Ontario have smoothed the way by taking in every sample from about a dozen cheesemakers, checking the paperwork, retaining a customs broker, loading all the cheeses on pallets and sending them off in a refrigerated truck.

Mary Ann Ferrer, a professor of food science at the university, who leads the effort, said that when the cheeses arrive at the competition, “everybody there gets excited and even applauds.”

Fromagerie La Station entered the awards for the first time in 2024, the year it began exporting cheese to the United States.

“We thought, let’s just apply and see what happens,” said Catherine Durand, the head of sales and marketing. La Station’s cheeses won eight medals, including best-in-show honors for its Raclette de Compton au poivre, which has a spicy seam of pink peppercorns in the middle. “That was really, really amazing, and everybody was like, ‘Who are they?’”

Fewer people asked that question when La Station won best in show again the following year, this time with Alfred Le Fermier, an Alpine-style raw cow’s milk wheel.

Trade barriers help explain why the mere existence of great Canadian cheese comes as a surprise to many Americans. It’s also true, though, that artisanal cheesemaking in the country really took off only in the last 15 years or so, alongside an already thriving industry of larger producers turning out Cheddar and other cheeses. Once the craft movement coalesced, though, it moved rapidly.

“The Canadian artisan cheese scene has not been around as long as California’s or Vermont’s, but they’ve gotten to that same level of quality in a much shorter time,” said James Hanly, the sales director at Provisions International, a food importer and distributor based in White River Junction, Vt.

Craft cheesemakers had a head start because Canadian milk is of high quality, governed by strict safety regulations and an agricultural policy of price setting, production quotas and high tariffs on imports. Known as the supply management system, the policy was designed to provide basic economic stability for dairies, protecting them from the steep dives in milk prices often seen on open commodity markets. Supporters say that farmers who don’t lie awake worrying about foreclosure can invest in equipment, facilities and animal care.

“If farmers are able to make a reasonable living with what they’ve got, there’s less drive to cut every last cent of cost,” said Shep Ysselstein, the founder of Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese in Woodstock, Ontario. “That’s when things start to get compromised. You might not spend as much money on bedding, for example, which can impact the cows.”

One person who does not care for the supply management system is Mr. Trump. Calling it “discrimination” against U.S. commerce, he cited it as the rationale for his 50 percent tariffs in a proclamation in September.

After a short time of seeming to wait for the new levies to go away, as some of Mr. Trump’s earlier ones did, industry opposition has started to form. This week, a lawsuit challenging the tariffs was filed on behalf of Gellert Global Group, a food importer and distributor based in Elizabeth, N.J., which estimated that it could have to pay $40 million a year on the Canadian cheese it brings into the United States.

Thomas Gellert, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview last month that his firm imports Brie from Canada made with New York State milk, which is less expensive than Canadian milk. Tariffs on that cheese, he said, will hurt American dairy farmers and consumers.

A trade group representing cheese importers has asked for an exemption from the new tariffs for cheeses made with milk from the states as well as those made with Canadian goat and sheep milk. The United States does not have enough dairy goats to produce all the soft goat cheese Americans eat.

“The U.S. relies heavily on Canada and Europe for its supply of that soft goat cheese, and has for a long time,” said Mark Anderson, chief executive of Mariposa Dairy, a goat- and sheep-cheese maker based in Lindsay, Ontario. Goat milk is traded outside Canada’s supply management system, he said, so if that system is the reason for the tariffs, “it kind of misses the mark.”

For smaller cheesemakers that have only begun to test the American market, the tariffs may not put a huge dent in their finances. COWS Creamery, an ice cream and cheese company on Prince Edward Island, exports only a small amount of its distinctly creamy and grassy Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar to the United States, said Chad Heron, the chief executive.

“The most recent tariffs or bans or whatever nonsense Trump is up to won’t have a material impact on us, but it will cause a bunch of people a bunch of pain and that is too bad,” Mr. Heron wrote in an email.

Several other creameries had been planning to catch the wave of American interest in Canada. Whether they will move ahead or wait for the trade war to end is an open question.

“We actually already have a distributor ready to sell our cheeses in the U.S.,” said Bérangère Boivin-Côté, a manager at Fromagerie Médard in St.-Gédéon, Quebec. Médard’s soft, European-style washed rind cheese Le Cousin was the first runner-up for American Cheese Society’s best-in-show title in 2024, and everybody there believed momentum for Canadian cheese was growing in the states. “However, we know that entering a new market can be challenging especially with the tariffs that are currently in place.”

The math on a 50 percent tax is punishing for artisanal products. Even if everybody in the supply chain agrees to swallow some of the tax, most of it will be passed on to consumers, said Eric Frechette, an owner of Provisions International. And the new prices could stop shoppers in their tracks.

“On a cheese counter in New York, things that went for $40 a pound are going to be $60 a pound or more,” said Alex Brown, the wholesale cheesemonger for Gourmet Imports in Alhambra, Calif. “Which bumps them from higher value quality cheeses to precious luxury goods.”

For shops, unsold cheese very quickly becomes money wasted.

“We’ll be forced to either drop a product or accept astronomical prices,” said Marc Hernandez, the cheese buyer for Formaggio Kitchen, based in Cambridge, Mass. “That will be a risk, particularly when dealing with a perishable product that could go bad before we can sell it.”