After decades of poor policies by previous administrations, Americans are paying more for canned goods, and it's cutting into affordability improvements at the grocery store. But President Donald Trump has been known to adjust the tariff model for industries in need, and this one appears ripe for relief from Trump. 

The United States manufactures 135 billion cans every year to hold such household staples as canned vegetables, infant formula and pet food. And according to industry insider Scott Breen, president of Can Manufacturers Institute, "We are making a lot of metal cans in this country because metal cans have a significant impact on our economy, on national security and on our public health, and every minute we're making a quarter million."

The safety of imported canned goods is also on the minds of such industry experts as Robert Gatz, who serves as vice president and general manager for Can Corporation of America. 

"Tin plate has a lot of properties in it," he says. "How you manufacture that can has a lot of properties and a lot of science, a lot of engineering to make sure it's shelf stable for a very long time. So as things are coming in from overseas, you have no certainty. You don't know how those foods or vegetables were grown, how they were processed, what vessel they're going into."

Finding a solution to the problem has congressional support as well, from such members as Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. 

"The regulatory costs that government has placed on manufacturing in this country is the source of these problems," he told Just The News, "It's not foreign competition. We can compete very effectively against foreign competition."

McClintock warned against the regulatory burden of the crisis and also said: "We can't compete against our own self-inflicted wounds by piling regulations upon taxes, upon more regulations that make things very scarce and therefore very expensive for the manufacturers and their customers."

The U.S. tinplate crisis stems from decades of offshoring steel and tin mill manufacturing to lower-cost countries, accelerated by free-trade policies under administrations from Clinton through Obama that prioritized globalization over domestic industrial protection, which has left the country heavily reliant on imports. 

Consumers are already feeling the heat from the can crisis in the form of price increases. 

A recent study by the Alpaugh Family Economics Center at the University of Cincinnati found canned tuna in Midwest grocery stores was up about 7.3% since just September, canned green beans are up 9.1% over the same period and canned soup is up a staggering 22.3%.  

"When I was going to the grocery store over the last couple of months, what once was $20 and under for a pot of American chili is not that anymore. It's around $30 to $35, sometimes $40 depending on whether it had meat, because meat has gone up too," Moms For America Chairwoman Rebekah Lichtwerch told Just The News exclusively. 

This issue persists throughout the entire supply chain, from consumers all the way down to the farmers, particularly those who grow the type of produce that ends up in the canned food aisle. Pulse crops (beans, lentils, peas and chickpeas) are the staples for Paul Kanning, a farmer in Montana who spoke to Just The News. 

"Without that steel can, my crops are useless if they have to stay in the field," Kanning warned. "And that can is the bridge from my farm to the American pantry. And when that bridge becomes too expensive, then farmers lose, American consumers lose, and grocery bills get too high. And it's just as simple as that."

Likewise, Glenn Abbett, who grows corn, soybeans and tomatoes in northwest Indiana, is experiencing a similar crisis. 

"The farmer is the end user, and therefore we get stuck with the added cost. And unfortunately, the added cost puts us out of reach for global competition, which we truly can't be in that situation." 

Abbett told Just The News that he spoke to the owner of a major canned tomato company who told him that companies overseas can put U.S. agriculture product into a can and ship it here cheaper, taking markets away. 

"We've got to find a solution for this," he said. "We need to find it fast, because Red Gold, a great American company, is not going to be able to survive if they have to buy cans that are more expensive than our competition across the ocean."

In 2024, the U.S. International Trade Commission's (ITC) decision not to impose antidumping duties on tinplate from Canada, China, Germany and South Korea resulted in Cleveland-Cliffs, North America's largest flat-rolled steel producer, indefinitely idling its century-old Weirton, West Virginia, plant, resulting in nearly 900 job losses and exposing ongoing vulnerabilities in domestic packaging supply chains.