The Great Coffee Tariff Rebate: How Specialty Importers Are Returning Millions to Roasters
For nearly seven months in 2025, every bag of green coffee that cleared U.S. Customs arrived with an unwelcome surcharge attached — a tax that had nothing to do with the quality of the beans inside, the labor of the farmers who grew them, or the market forces that determine what coffee is worth. It was, as one importer put it plainly, a tax paid by Americans, not by foreign governments. Now, in a story that spans the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Oakland tasting room of a 48-year-old family business, that money is starting to come back — and some of the most respected names in specialty coffee importing are moving fast to make sure their customers see every cent of it.
How It Started: Liberation Day and the Tariff Shock
President Trump announced the reciprocal tariffs on April 2, 2025, triggering widespread disruption across U.S. supply chains, including in coffee, an industry that depends almost entirely on imported green coffee. The policy, quickly dubbed "Liberation Day" tariffs, applied broad duties to goods entering the United States from virtually every trading partner. For coffee importers, the shock was immediate and painful.
Tariffs are taxes on importers, not foreign exporters. U.S. companies must pay immediately at customs, creating major cash flow strain and higher financing costs. In concrete terms, that meant importers like Royal Coffee in Emeryville, California were wiring money to the federal government via immediate ACH transfer — sometimes on tens of thousands of pounds of green coffee — before a single roasting customer had placed a purchase order. The financial math was brutal.
The Trump administration imposed tariffs on all imported goods, including coffee, starting in April 2025, with rates varying widely by country — some countries saw tariffs as high as 50%, while others saw rates as low as 10%. Vietnam, the world's second-largest coffee producer and the dominant supplier of robusta beans, faced a 46% duty — a rate that threatened to scramble global supply chains for commercial-grade espresso blends and canned coffee products alike. Meanwhile, importers shouldered the initial burden, but many passed on the increased costs to their customers.
The Dollar Damage to the Industry
The amount of tariffs calculated on U.S. coffee imports surged during the IEEPA regime. Tariff costs totaled approximately $965 million between March and November of 2025, representing a more than 16,000-percent increase compared to the same period in 2024. That figure alone tells you everything you need to know about the scale of disruption. One billion dollars, effectively extracted from an industry that operates on thin margins and long supply chains, in less than a year.
For roasters, the costs filtered through quickly. Ron Kurnik, owner of Superior Coffee Roasting Co. in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, told Fortune he already had to raise prices by 6% on two separate occasions due to the tariffs — and that was before accounting for retaliatory tariffs from Canada, where much of his business originates. He wasn't alone. Across the specialty coffee world, roasters absorbed sticker shock on landed green coffee costs and were forced to pass those increases downstream to cafes, subscribers, and retail customers.
The First Relief: Coffee Gets Carved Out
The first crack in the tariff wall came in mid-November 2025. Coffee was among certain food products exempted from IEEPA tariffs on November 14, 2025. By late November 2025, those tariffs were lifted. Most origins cleared on November 13, and Brazil on November 20.
The Brazil exemption came with its own complicated backstory. On November 20, 2025, the White House issued a new Presidential Action, explicitly modifying the previous Executive Order from July 30th, the one that imposed a separate 40% duty on Brazilian coffee. The administration determined that, due to progress in negotiations with the Brazilian government, agricultural imports should be removed from the sanctions list. Given that Brazil is the single largest supplier of green coffee to the United States, the removal of its 40% duty was not a minor footnote — it was the difference between a recoverable market and a permanently distorted one.
But for all the relief that November exemptions brought, they came with a critical caveat: tariffs on most green coffee from most countries were removed as of November 13 at 12:01 a.m. ET under a new White House order, lowering landed costs for most coffees entering the U.S., but tariffs paid before November 13 were not refundable under that order. Months of duty payments — hundreds of millions of dollars — remained in the federal government's coffers, with no mechanism yet established to get them back.
The Supreme Court Changes Everything
The legal picture shifted dramatically on February 20, 2026. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources v. Trump that tariffs imposed under IEEPA were unlawful, striking them down. In the six-to-three decision, the Court ruled that the President had inappropriately used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to enact the tariffs, and that congressional approval would be required for such tariffs.
In their ruling, the Supreme Court left open the door for refunds for those tariffs paid by U.S. companies. Though they gave no resolution or administrative mechanisms for it, one of the dissenting judges, Brett Kavanaugh, argued that the U.S. "may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs" and that the whole process would be a "mess."
Kavanaugh's warning proved prescient. Customs collected roughly $166 billion in duties under IEEPA, across more than 53 million import entries and over 330,000 importers. No system existed to return any of it, so CBP had to build one. A federal court ordered tariff refunds in early March 2026, then suspended its own order days later because the agency could not process a return that large. The sheer administrative weight of unwinding a tariff regime of this scale had no precedent in American customs history.
Building the CAPE Portal
U.S. Customs and Border Protection launched Phase 1 of its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) tool on April 20 to process IEEPA duty refunds. The system was designed from the ground up to handle a problem CBP had never faced before: simultaneously processing claims from hundreds of thousands of importers across tens of millions of shipment entries.
To manage the huge volume of expected claims, CAPE allows importers of record (IOR), or their licensed customs brokers, to submit a single CAPE declaration covering potentially thousands of entries instead of filing entry by entry. According to CBP guidance, the agency will recalculate duties, liquidate or reliquidate entries as appropriate, and issue a single lump-sum refund with interest.
The eligible window for refunds is specific and unforgiving. Green coffee was subject to IEEPA tariffs from April 5, 2025, when the reciprocal tariff took effect, through November 12, 2025, the day before a later executive action exempting coffee took effect. Phase 1 of CAPE specifically covers two categories of entries: shipments that remain unliquidated and shipments liquidated within the past 80 days. Everything else — meaning entries finally liquidated more than 80 days before the portal opened, or roughly before January 30, 2026 — is excluded for now. For coffee importers, that means much of the older part of the tariff window — especially shipments from spring and summer 2025 — may fall outside Phase 1 because those entries have had more time to liquidate. Later phases are expected to address older liquidated entries, along with other more complex cases such as drawback and reconciliation.
Even under the best circumstances, patience is required. CBP estimates that once a claim is accepted, refunds take 60 to 90 days to be issued, but this varies by shipment. Given the high volume of claims currently being processed, the full timeline may run into 2027.
Royal Coffee Steps Up First
Among the companies that have moved most publicly and decisively, Royal Coffee stands out. On July 1, 2026, Royal Coffee announced that it had begun issuing IEEPA Tariff Credits to customers who purchased green coffee during the 2025 IEEPA tariff period, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection returns the duties Royal paid.
The numbers involved are significant. To date, CBP has begun returning duties on 927 coffee lots, with additional claims in process. In total, Royal Coffee is actively pursuing recovery on 1,044 coffee lots through a combination of direct filings and claims made through other importers of record. Each of those lots represents a specific origin, a specific farm relationship, and a specific roaster customer who paid a higher price than they should have.
Each IEEPA Tariff Credit identifies the coffee, lot number, invoice, weight, tariff rate per pound, and total credit amount. Credits may be applied to open invoices. The granularity of that documentation reflects months of meticulous record-keeping during a period when most companies were simply trying to stay afloat.
What makes Royal Coffee's move particularly notable is that it was entirely voluntary. "There was no legal requirement to issue these credits. After 48 years in business, the decision wasn't a difficult one." Royal's CEO Max Nicholas-Fulmer was equally direct in the company's public statement: "We could have kept this money. There is no legal mandate to return any of it. After 48 years in business, that was never going to be our choice."
The Crown Joins In
Royal Coffee's commitment extended beyond its wholesale business. Its Oakland tasting room, The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room, will temporarily reduce coffee drink prices to return the IEEPA duties it paid on coffee served during the affected period. The retail gesture is small in dollar terms but significant as a statement of values — a company choosing to pass savings to walk-in customers who had no contractual relationship requiring it.
The Crown's decision was not made lightly. The raw cost of importing coffee — including volatility in the oil market due to ongoing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Southwest Asia and North Africa region — continues to put enormous pressure on coffee prices. The company acknowledged it cannot afford to sustain its business with a permanent discount on retail prices. The temporary price reduction, then, is a time-limited pass-through tied directly to the specific tariff amounts recovered — not a promotional stunt.
Onyx Coffee and the Smaller Importers
Royal Coffee isn't alone in making this pledge. Some roasters are already sending messages to their consumers letting them know they plan to pass on tariff reimbursements. In a statement on its Instagram page, the importer Onyx Coffee (not to be confused with Onyx Coffee Lab) said that "every cent we receive in tariff refunds will be passed directly back to you. You do not need to take any action."
Over the course of more than two dozen interviews during the past year, Daily Coffee News learned that numerous importing companies — particularly smaller traders focused on specialty coffee — made contractual promises to roasters during the tariff period that they would issue refunds if and when those importers were reimbursed. These weren't handshake deals made after the Supreme Court ruling. Many of these commitments were written into contracts during the tariff period itself, when nobody knew with any certainty that refunds would ever materialize.
While those negotiations remain highly company-specific, larger importers that could potentially recover millions of dollars have generally taken a cautious, wait-and-see approach in public. The contrast with smaller, specialty-focused traders is telling. For companies whose entire identity is built around direct relationships with specific farms and roasters, the ethical calculus of keeping tariff money that customers effectively paid is harder to justify — and apparently harder to stomach.
Algrano's Proactive Approach
Switzerland-based green coffee marketplace Algrano, which facilitates direct trade between origin producers and U.S. roasters, also moved quickly to commit its customers to a transparent refund process. Algrano has already filed the claimback on behalf of its customers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Customers don't need to do anything. When the money arrives, Algrano will reach out and issue credit notes.
The commitment from Algrano carries weight precisely because it was made before any money had been recovered. The U.S. government launched the first phase of the refund process on April 20, 2026. CBP estimates that once a claim is accepted, refunds take 60 to 90 days to be issued, but this varies by shipment. Companies like Algrano are effectively making a promise against a payment that may not clear for months.
Where the Trade Associations Stand
Given the scale of what the specialty coffee industry absorbed during the IEEPA tariff period, one might expect the sector's major trade bodies to be at the center of the refund conversation — providing guidance, aggregating data, or at minimum advocating loudly for a fast and fair return process. That hasn't entirely been the case.
Neither of the country's two largest trade associations, the Specialty Coffee Association and the National Coffee Association, have issued publicly available guidance to coffee companies since the refund portal launched.
When asked directly, the NCA offered general advocacy language rather than operational guidance. "NCA is continuing to advocate broadly for tariff-free coffee trade," NCA CEO and President William "Bill" Murray said. "With regard to tariff refunds, NCA can provide summaries of administration announcements, but — since the impact of tariffs varies across companies and supply chains — each company has to determine any appropriate course of individual action."
The SCA's response leaned into its international character. An SCA representative told Daily Coffee News that the group "doesn't provide guidance on any single country's import/export regulations or trade policy," adding, "we want to be thoughtful about our identity as a truly international organization." For U.S. roasters and importers who just watched nearly a billion dollars in unlawful tariffs pass through their books, that answer lands with a particular hollowness.
What the Refunds Actually Accomplish — and What They Don't
It would be easy to frame the tariff refund story as a simple win: money wrongly taken, money returned. The reality is considerably more complicated.
For one thing, the refunds only cover IEEPA-specific tariffs. Only tariffs collected under IEEPA are potentially eligible for refunds. Tariffs imposed under other legal authorities are not affected by this ruling. That matters because the coffee trade now operates in a landscape that includes additional Section 232 surcharges, country-specific duties, and other regulatory layers that accumulated separately from the IEEPA regime.
For another, the logistics costs associated with tariff compliance don't come back with the refund check. For Royal, the millions of dollars paid in tariffs on its entire import inventory between April and November of 2025 further increased other costs, including administrative fees to customs brokers, fees to consulting firms to ensure GAAP compliance in tariff bookkeeping, and higher insurance rates, not to mention the untold additional hours of labor undertaken by trading, inbound traffic, and accounting teams to track and calculate data. None of those costs are recoverable. They were absorbed by the business — and ultimately, by roasters and consumers.
There's also the fundamental question of whether any of this money reaches the coffee drinker ordering a pour-over at a neighborhood cafe. As the government continues to pay back U.S. companies, consumers should eventually begin to feel relief as businesses gradually pass along cost savings — although it's worth noting that because consumer prices are driven by myriad factors, the savings may not be obvious or widely felt.
The Pass-Through Problem
The refund question sits inside a broader debate about who actually bore the cost of the tariffs and who deserves to recover it. A consortium of state fiscal leaders recently requested public disclosure of refund applicants from the office of the president, arguing that "a refund process absent pass-through costs risks directing public relief to parties unharmed." The stakes for transparency for the average American consumer are high; the public will soon find out which importing businesses will make good on their promises.
The concern is legitimate. An importer that fully passed tariff costs to roasters — who then passed them to cafes, who then passed them to consumers — is in line to receive a lump-sum refund from CBP while the consumers who actually funded it wait for a trickle-down that may never fully materialize. The importers like Royal Coffee and Onyx who are proactively issuing credits are addressing this directly. Others may not.
A Policy Experiment With No Winners
Zooming out, the coffee industry's tariff saga reads as a case study in the costs of poorly targeted trade policy. This coffee-tariffs venture begs the question of what it actually accomplished, considering the tariffs raised already exorbitant coffee costs, were mostly abandoned by the administration after consumer complaints, and are now expected to be refunded entirely.
The answers to the basic policy questions are damning. Did the coffee tariffs reduce the coffee trade deficit? No — total imports continued to grow year-over-year despite the tariffs, due to Americans' insatiable caffeine addiction. Did the coffee tariffs encourage domestic production? No — there was precisely a zero-percent increase in U.S. coffee production in 2025, and this is expected to remain the case in 2026. Did the coffee tariffs raise government revenue? Yes — an estimated additional $1 billion was raised from the tariffs on coffee, but of course this money now has to be paid back to importers with interest.
The United States imports more than 99 percent of the coffee Americans drink, mostly as green coffee beans, so even small disruptions in origin supply, pricing, or trade policy show up quickly in landed cost and delivery timing. A tariff on coffee is, almost by definition, a tariff on American businesses and American consumers — there is nowhere else for the cost to go. The Supreme Court recognized as much in its ruling, and now the machinery of restitution is grinding slowly into motion.
What Roasters and Coffee Buyers Should Do Now
For the roasters, coffee shop owners, and wholesale buyers who spent much of 2025 eating higher landed costs, the practical question is simple: what, if anything, do they need to do to get their money back?
The short answer, for most, is nothing — at least not right now. Refunds are issued to the Importer of Record. For green coffee shipments, this is the importing company, such as Royal Coffee. Roasters cannot apply for refunds directly. Any claims must be filed by the importer through U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
As CBP returns duties on individual lots, Royal Coffee is issuing IEEPA Tariff Credits to the customers who purchased those coffees. Its customers bore those tariff costs through higher prices. Issuing IEEPA Tariff Credits is how the company is returning those costs to the customers who paid them. Customers who purchased green coffee from Royal during the IEEPA tariff period will be contacted by the company's accounting team as IEEPA Tariff Credits are issued.
For roasters working with importers who haven't yet made public commitments, it may be worth a direct conversation — particularly for those who purchased significant volumes of green coffee between April 5 and November 12, 2025. The ethical and reputational pressure on importers to pass along recovered funds is real, even where no legal obligation exists. In a market as relationship-driven as specialty coffee, how companies handle this moment will not be forgotten quickly.
The Bigger Picture for the Specialty Coffee World
The tariff refund story is ultimately about more than money. It's a test of the values that specialty coffee companies have spent decades broadcasting: transparency, direct trade, equitable partnerships, shared risk. As importers begin sorting through the paperwork, roasters, retailers and other coffee businesses affected by higher prices are watching to see whether any of that relief will eventually be passed along downstream.
The companies that step up — that document carefully, file promptly, and issue credits without being asked — are distinguishing themselves in a market where trust is the most durable competitive advantage. Royal Coffee's 48-year record gives its CEO's words particular weight. "There was no legal requirement to issue these credits. After 48 years in business, the decision wasn't a difficult one." That is a sentence that means something in a business built on long-term relationships with farms and roasters across 30 countries.
Coffee will be one of many impacted products to watch in the months ahead to see the effect tariff refunds might have on prices for consumers. But for the roasters who source with intention and the importers who built their businesses around honest dealing, the refund process is less a financial transaction than a character test — one that the best players in specialty coffee appear ready to pass.
