Sapporo to move some beer production from Canada to US after tariffs

Japanese brewing company Sapporo said Monday it will shift some of its production from Canada to the U.S. in the wake of the Trump administration’s new tariffs on Canadian beer.

Last month, President Trump implemented 50 percent levies on Canadian alcoholic products like beer and wine, in addition to a wide variety of other imported goods.

The move escalated an ongoing trade fight between the U.S. and Canada. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on a large swath of U.S. goods went into effect on Tuesday.

Sapporo’s chief strategy officer, Rieko Shofu, told Bloomberg in an interview that the tariffs are “something out of our control” and that the company would “move ahead with local production.”

The Hill has reached out to Sapporo for comment.

The beer company will move the production of its non-alcoholic beer, which is manufactured in Canada, to the U.S. by the first half of 2027, Shofu told Bloomberg. The company is reportedly weighing either buying or building a brewery on the West Coast.

“The U.S. is a huge market, and we have a lot of momentum right now in terms of how much we can expand our share of that market,” Shofu told Bloomberg.

Sapporo is the fourth-largest beermaker in Japan and the producer of the top-selling Asian beer in the U.S.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded to Canada’s new retaliatory tariffs in an interview at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event Tuesday in Washington.

“If I were the Canadians, I would be careful because they wanted the benefits of being a state without being a state,” Bessent said. “And now that the arrangements may be splintering, everyone is going to come to our side.”