Chapman’s Ice Cream in Markdale says it’s taking a Canada first approach to doing business amid tariff threats from the United States.
The company says in a statement, “As Canada faces the greatest threat to our sovereignty since WWII, the effects of Donald Trump’s threats are already being felt by most Canadians.
“As a proud Canadian-owned and operated company, we want to do our part to support Canadians.
“As a family, we have decided to absorb all immediate increases in our costs due to the Trump-tariffs for the rest of the year to maintain our prices. We are actively looking internationally for alternative suppliers of ingredients that are unavailable in Canada.
“We will continue to reinforce Canadian-first policies within our operations, because together we are stronger.
“We will never be the 51st state!”
Chapman’s Vice President Ashley Chapman tells Bayshore Broadcasting News, “Chapman’s Ice Cream is more worried about your average Canadians. Your low-income earners be they young, be they whatever, who don’t have a lot of money to speak of right now. A $700, $800 expense in a month is going to put them out on the street. This is the type of Canadian that we’re worried about. Yeah, we only make ice cream but if we can do anything, we should do it. It’s morally right to do it.”
He explains, “We’re just planning on sucking it up and trying to keep our prices exactly the same as they are today and hopefully we will all weather this ridiculous storm together and come out the other side stronger.”
Chapman gives an example of potential supplier changes, explaining they have sourced their nuts from the United States, “We’re quite lucky in the sense that historically, the United States has has very excellent quality nuts so pecans, walnuts, almonds, everything you can possibly imagine. They’re very high quality and it’s really quite easy to bring them up from the United States. Now with the 25 per cent tariff, suddenly they are not competitive in any way, shape or form. A good example would be almonds and pistachios where we’re currently looking at bringing them in from Italy, which prior to this ridiculous trade war, shipping them over in cargo containers in a ship was not something we wanted to deal with when it was so much easier to get from the states at a lower cost, but with these 25 per cent tariffs suddenly Italian, Spanish nut meats are actually quite affordable in comparison with the shipping.”
Chapman notes, “The businesses that have the luxury of doing this may not be all over the place. We have a very simple structure here. The board of directors is my mother, my father and myself. If we need to make a decision, I just walk about 15 feet down the hall when they’re in the morning ad we have a quick chat. A lot of other companies have shareholders, they might be publicly traded companies and let’s just say that typically in those kinds of company structures absorbing costs that take away a good portion of your margin is not something that the shareholders are going to support or allow to happen.”
He says “There’s a certain hope that us getting out there in front of this and saying, ‘this is our commitment to Canadians,’ will push other companies that have the same luxury that we do to say, ‘You know what? Times are getting tough but we’re going to do the best that we can for Canadians as long as we can absorb these costs.’”
Chapman adds, “Hopefully this doesn’t come into place. Their first round of retaliatory tariffs from the Canadian government were pretty mild. They only targeted the red states, but second round if the one that certainly Chapman’s and a lot of other businesses are really worried about because those are the blanket ones. Blue states, red states, all of these things that we’re going to put these tariffs on that’s when we’re going to have the worst hit to our bottom line.”
Chapman feels President Trump is unpredictable, and adds, “I would like to think that cooler heads will prevail in the United States.” He hopes Trump’s republicans will not continue a trade war, saying, “This is going to be devastating for the United States and Canada.”
