What Trump’s Tariffs Mean for Canned Soup

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Wilbur Ross** (0:08)
This is a can of Campbell's soup.

**Shawn Donnan** (0:12)
I brought a prop.

**David Gura** (0:13)
Look at that. Let me have you introduce yourself.

**Shawn Donnan** (0:15)
I'm Shawn Donnan. I write about the US and global economies from Washington.

**David Gura** (0:21)
What do you have with you?

**Shawn Donnan** (0:23)
A can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.

**David Gura** (0:25)
Campbell's chicken noodle soup.

**Shawn Donnan** (0:27)
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.

**Wilbur Ross** (0:45)
Well, I just bought this can today out of 7-Eleven down here, and the price was $1.99.

**David Gura** (0:52)
This is, as you've written, Shawn, a mostly forgotten footnote of President Trump's first term. Wilbur Ross, on CNBC, the day after the president announced what were some of his first tariffs, 25% tariffs on foreign steel, he was out there doing some damage control.

**Shawn Donnan** (1:06)
Yeah, so the markets were having connections 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.

**Wilbur Ross** (1:21)
In the can of Campbell soup, there's about 2.6 cents, 2.6 pennies worth of steel.
So if that goes up by 25%, that's about six-tenths of one cent on the price of a can of Campbell soup. So who in the world is going to be too bothered by six-tenths of a cent?

**Shawn Donnan** (1:45)
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 US economy.

**David Gura** (2:07)
Today in Trump's second term, tariffs on imported steel are twice what they were back then, 50%. And 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

**Shawn Donnan** (2:25)
So tariffs are a tool and a threat that this administration keeps using. Just this week we've got this 50% 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 US economy. 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?
Was this good for the tin can industry?

**David Gura** (3:21)
I'm David Gura 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.

**Robert Gatz** (3:46)
I don't know if you ought to put this on the podcast, Robert. I always say this. The can itself is not a sexy package.

**David Gura** (3:53)
Robert Gatz is the vice president and general manager at Can Corporation of America.

**Robert Gatz** (3:58)
But there is still value in the can.

**David Gura** (4:02)
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.

**Robert Gatz** (4:17)
Inventories need to be at a certain level.
If you think back to COVID timeframe, you go into the grocery store during COVID, everything was gone. What were the first two things gone? Toilet paper and canned goods.

**David Gura** (4:32)
Shawn, 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.