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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Trump

Tariffs Pushing Consumer Hardware Makers into Crisis Mode

During normal times, running a hardware business is tough. Throw in a tariff-driven trade war, and it becomes a full-blown crisis.

Just ask Robin Liss. When the CEO of kitchen appliance maker Suvie saw that President Trump wasn’t backing down from imposing steep tariffs on products from China and beyond, she realized she’d have to move manufacturing out of China or risk her entire business.

Liss told CNBC she’d need to reconfigure Suvie’s manufacturing and supply chain operations on an accelerated timeline or miss out on her most important sales season in the fall.

From CNBC:

Suvie’s products—kitchen gadgets that can whip up dinner in a matter of minutes—are built in a facility located in one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs and consist of more than 500 components sourced throughout the country.

After running the numbers and calculating the costs associated with the new tariffs, Liss headed to Asia in March in search of a Plan B.

“I’m going to run out of appliances,” Liss said ahead of her two-week trip to Taiwan and Vietnam. “I’ve got to figure this out.”

While tariffs impact nearly any company with a global supply chain, consumer hardware manufacturers—from Apple and Google to Suvie—are especially vulnerable. That’s because most rely on Asian manufacturing after decades of offshoring has hollowed out U.S. manufacturing capacity. Bringing production stateside would require massive cost increases and a multi-year transition at best.

Suvie is just one of many hardware makers now scrambling to rewrite their supply chain playbook in response to the tariffs. The question is: how many can actually make the leap—and survive?

Trump’s Meals in a Box Plan for SNAP Participants is Full of Baloney

In an effort to cut spending on food assistance to low-income families, the Trump administration has proposed replacing some food stamps with a meal delivery type service. The Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program (SNAP), often colloquially referred to as food stamps, provide a monthly supplement for purchasing healthy food to eligible, low-income families.

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said these meal deliveries would be akin to Blue Apron, but the comparison is downright laughable when you look at what the government actually proposes.

Blue Apron customers get to choose their meals and receive insulated boxes of fresh proteins and vegetables. According to The Washington Post, recipients of “America’s Harvest Boxes” would get “shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables.” All these items would be homegrown by “American farmers and producers” for that added jingoistic je ne sais quoi.

For households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits (that’s 81% of SNAP households overall), half of those benefits would come in the form of these government-provided boxes.

Mulvaney defends the approach, saying that the government can buy food wholesale at a low cost, which is more economical than having people buy it directly at retail. Which technically may be true, but critics were quick to point out many of the problems with this Harvest Box approach.

Then there are the retailers. Walmart and Target could lose billions with these proposed cuts to food stamp purchases, and it would certainly hurt the new USDA pilot program set to launch later this year that allows food stamp purchases to be made with retailers online.

And that doesn’t even touch on the logistics and expense of having the government oversee preparation and shipping of millions of boxes on time on a regular basis.

To be sure, the food stamp program in America needs to be updated and improved. And there are startups such as All_ebt out there trying to make it easier for SNAP participants to access more options for fresher, healthier food through online food deliveries.

“We are going backwards in terms of technology,” said All_ebt founder Eli Calderón Morin told me by phone. “Fundamentally, I don’t think we should try to police what people eat.” Morin believes the conversation should be changed from punishing people simply because they are poor to empowering people to make better financial and healthier choices—which isn’t going to happen if the government takes those choices and boxes them up.