What ingredients should I stockpile because of tariffs? How should I store them?

The Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs went into effect early April 9. Within hours, President Trump paused them for 90 days, instead applying a 10% universal tariff for all affected countries besides China, which saw its “reciprocal” tariff rate rise to 125%. These are moves that will inevitably shake up global food supply chains.

Even as the administration pulls back on tariffs and says that it’s looking to strike deals in an attempt to calm the markets, there remains a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty, combined with the tariffs now in place, are still likely to lead to higher prices for some goods. In many ways, this feels like the early days of the pandemic in 2020, with reports indicating that the price of bananas, vanilla, coffee, and even toilet paper will go up in coming weeks.

Economists have made the case against stockpiling groceries. But purchasing goods from vulnerable small businesses with global supply chains could help ensure their viability. “Small businesses are specifically hit hard by the tariffs,” said Ori Zohar, the co-founder of Burlap and Barrel, a spice company that solely sources from smallholder farms. “We don’t have the luxury of big teams, big bank relationships, or big contracts to keep things steady. We’re planning for November and December now, but we don’t know what’s going to happen even tomorrow.”

Zohar said that his company currently has spices in transit from regions that were slated to be hardest hit by looming tariffs. It recently held a “tariff sale” to make more funds available and support the import of spice crops in the near future.

Based on the feasibility of storage and stockpiling, this is my trade war shopping list, with special attention paid to the tariffs levied on China, and planned to go into effect against the following countries at the end of the 90-day freeze: Vietnam (46%), Cambodia (49%), Laos (48%), Madagascar (47%), and Thailand (36%).

The overwhelming majority of coffee consumed by Americans is imported by necessity, since the only place it grows domestically is Hawai’i, with its tropical ecosystems. Given its role in daily life, coffee imports have been duty-free for decades — tariffs on coffee and tea is a signature departure from precedent. Vietnam is America’s third largest source of coffee, and it could be hit particularly hard by tariffs, a crushing blow to a new generation of Vietnamese coffee roasters, like Nguyen Coffee Supply. Hawaiian coffee is already notably more expensive than all but the fanciest imported coffee, due to the higher costs of operating in the U.S., including labor. It will likely grow more expensive as the cost of imported coffee increases — and as the industry there continues to battle a number of environmental issues (disease, invasive species, climate change) that have caused output to drop in recent years.

Coffee goes stale within a few weeks, especially if it’s been pre-ground, but whole beans can be stored in the freezer in an airtight container for months without little detriment to quality. Vacuum sealing is the gold standard, but if the beans come sealed in a bag with a one-way valve you can just chuck them in the freezer. A plastic zipper bag with the air squeezed out can work just fine. You can either thaw the beans out before brewing, or, if you’ve batched them into single doses, you can throw the beans straight into the grinder. Just make sure when you pull the beans out and pop the seal that you’re going to brew them — you don’t want to move them back and forth between your counter and the freezer.

The rice industry in the U.S. is significant, and while heirloom varieties like Carolina Gold are increasingly grown here, there is simply no match for the range of rice that comes out of Asia, which produces the vast majority of the world’s rice supply. Like many other agricultural products, rice has terroir; long-grain varieties grown in China, like jasmine rice, are especially floral and fragrant in ways that commodity American long grain rice is not. The domestic rice industry is also facing difficulty as, evidenced by the closure of Koda Farms, a family business that operated in California for nearly a century.

My personal favorite is Jasberry rice, grown in northeast Thailand and sold by a small business stateside. Yesterday, I ordered half a dozen packages of it and plan to store it in sealed, airtight containers. The specific type of container does not matter, so long as it is kept away from light and placed in a dry, cool place; my own pantry contains many types of rice stored in everything from buckets with tight lids to deli quart containers and glass jars with rubber seals.

Like coffee, vanilla must be grown in tropical climates and is only done so in Hawai’i as small, specialty crops — not nearly enough to feed our insatiable desire for vanilla in most baked goods, and many ice creams. The U.S. has imposed a 47% tariff on Madagascar, which produces about 80% of the world’s vanilla.

You can store vanilla beans for months by wrapping them in plastic wrap or placing them in a zipper bag, then putting the package into a sealed container. I’m likely going to make large batches of homemade vanilla extract by sinking the split pods into vodka. No store-bought vanilla extract tastes better than homemade, and you can continue adding vodka as you use your extract to prolong the life of the beans.

Pure vanilla extract also keeps indefinitely, so if that’s your preferred way of using vanilla, by all, means purchase as much as you can store away from heat and light, especially from small businesses like Curio Spice Company and Burlap and Barrel.

The U.S. is woefully behind Southeast Asia and China when it comes to seaweed farming in terms of both output and variety, due in large part to lack of investment in seaweed aquaculture and the non-existence of regulations. I’m not so concerned about commodity nori, which I use for homemade musubi and sushi, but I am worried about small producers of esoteric specialty seaweeds.

Kombu, for instance, are large, thick pieces of seaweed that form the base of many of my homemade stocks, dashis, and broths; it’s why restaurant miso soup generally tastes better than the at-home version. Much of it is grown in China. There are also seaweed powders and furikake blends that I can’t live without and my favorites come from South Korea. They get sprinkled onto rice, noodles, and practically anything else I cook at home that might need a different texture or a boost of umami, from fried chicken to steak.

I’m stocking up on seaweed sold by small American companies but grown in Asia, such as gamtae from Gotham Grove, which sources its seaweeds from South Korea (which is facing a 25% tariff). These seaweeds are all dried, with long shelf lives, which you can prolong by storing them in the freezer. (To be totally fair, I ordered seaweed in bulk for lower pricing even when there was not an active trade war.)

As with the other ingredients on this list, the quantity of fish sauce — used in stir-fries, savory salads, and noodle dishes from pad thai to pancit — produced stateside is a drop in the bucket.

Most of the fish sauces and pastes available in Philly are from Southeast Asian countries hit hardest by tariffs, such as Cambodia (49%). The Philippines faces the least steep tariff of the major fish sauce producers, at 17%, but each country makes specific varieties of fish sauce, so stock up accordingly.

The practice of fermenting fish sauce has been around for millennia. It was independently developed and devoured by everyone in the Roman Empire (it ran on garum) and in Southeast Asia. The upshot of this is: Don’t worry too much about how you store fish sauce. You can even ignore the sell-by date (which the FDA wants to get rid of anyway). The whole point of fish sauce is that the fermentation allows it to keep for years in the pantry. The ancient Romans did not have refrigerators, after all.

Sichuan peppercorns, like many items on this list, exhibit unique properties due to terroir — most notably, the signature tingling sensation they produce when eaten. Despite the name, the Sichuan pepper, grown primarily in China, is distinct from black pepper or chiles; it’s derived from the prickly-ash tree. It requires hot summers to grow, as well as skilled labor to harvest, as cultivation, growing, and harvesting are all fully manual processes.

50Hertz Foods, which sells Sichuan peppercorns, Sichuan peppercorn-infused oil, and Sichuan peppercorn-spiked tingly peanuts, has experience dealing with the impacts of Trump-imposed tariffs. “For example, he imposed a 25% tariff on peanuts in his first term,” Yao Zhao, 50Hertz’s founder said. But the enormous new tariffs Trump announced on China on April 9, of 125%, are new territory. With these especially steep tariffs, Zhao is expecting to raise prices on his products soon. The company is currently promoting a tariff sale through April 15 because he’s hoping to “build a warchest for the winter days,” he said. “Winter is coming. We have a shipment in the ocean right now that will get hit. Any cash right now will help us smooth out that delivery.”

Dried Sichuan peppercorns and peppercorn-infused oil have long shelf lives — both more than a year — and that can be extended for many more years in a refrigerator (not the freezer).

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