Chocolate giant Hershey said Thursday that it is “engaging” with the U.S. government in hopes of exempting the key ingredient in its products — which cannot be grown in the U.S. — from tariffs.
The company’s chief financial officer, Steve Voskuil, said it is “using every lever at our disposal to get those tariffs changed,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hershey said tariffs on cocoa imports, along with retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada, are the main sources of its exposure to them, the Journal reported. The company expects tariffs to increase its costs by $15 million to $20 million in the current quarter, but those costs, left unchanged, could jump to $100 million in the final quarters of the year.
Most of the world’s cocoa comes from West Africa; prices had already risen in recent years amid poor harvests in the region.