President Trump’s topsy-turvy tariffs have turned the business world upside down — and the companies that supply ingredients to the world’s supplement makers are no exception to feeling the effects.
“It has been a roller coaster ride the whole of 2025,” said Suresh Lakshmikanthan, the chief business officer at Natural Remedies, an Indian ayurvedic botanicals ingredient company. “The tariffs have had a significant impact on our production plan, our supply chain, our contracts with the growers and also the customers who are formulating the product.”
Ingredient and supplement companies say that tariffs are even having an impact on product quality as some companies seek cheaper ingredients or change their product, so it doesn’t include as many high-potency (and high-cost) ingredients as in the pre-tariff days.
India provides a good tariff case study.
According to the Times of India, tariffs have been in almost constant motion since President Donald Trump took U.S. office. In the midst of U.S.-India trade talks, the U.S. imposed a 26 percent tariff on Indian goods on April 2, 2025, only to roll that back to 10 percent a week later as talks continued. The rate shot up to 25 percent on July 31, then doubled to 50 percent a week later as the U.S. punished India for buying Russian oil.
On Feb. 2, 2026, India agreed to halt its Russian oil imports, and the U.S. dropped the rate to 18 percent.
Then on Feb. 20, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose tariffs — taking the rate to zero — and the president said he would seek alternative methods, using a different legal basis to impose a 10 percent tariff on all countries.
‘Ridiculous’ unpredictability
That unpredictability has been one of the most difficult aspects of the tariff regime, said Shaheen Majeed, CEO and managing director of Sabinsa, an Indian company that produces herbal extracts, specialty chemicals, biotics and other products for the nutritional, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food industries.
Majeed said if the United States imposed a single tariff — even at an exorbitant rate, like the 50 percent tariff India has had to deal with at times — he could make supply chain decisions, deal with the farmers who grow Sabinsa’s raw materials or even decide to move production to another country. But if that other country runs into similar tariff issues, then Sabinsa would have spent a lot of money on a strategy that won’t work.
“The most ridiculous thing was the unpredictability,” Majeed said.
Given the landscape, Majeed said Sabinsa has decided to maintain its sourcing and production “in the safest place we know, which is India. It’s where we produce. It’s where we do the agriculture.”
And that’s meant swallowing 50 percent tariffs. “It’s been tough,” he said. “No question.”
Risking customer trust
Because tariffs have driven up costs, many companies have sought ways to lower prices. Majeed and Lakshmikanthan warn those companies to tread lightly, because they could damage their brand in the process.
“All the studies that were done on turmeric extract really concentrated on the 95 percent assay,” Majeed said. At that level — almost pure turmeric — the plant’s curcuminoids are the most effective, so that’s typically what manufacturers put into their capsules, tablets and gummies. That’s the level at which people saw better heart health and lower cholesterol, blood sugar and inflammatory conditions.
Now, however, with tariffs driving up costs, “we’ve seen companies move into 20 percent assay material,” Majeed said. “Twenty percent doesn’t have the bioefficacy.”
Bottles of turmeric extract, in any form, don’t typically reveal the percentage of the assay, Majeed said. A consumer would only see, for instance, that one bottle costs $20 and another costs $11. But the lower-cost bottle might not be as effective.
And even though the company made the sale, they may regret it in the long run.
“You can lose a customer,” Majeed said. “And once you start losing a consumer to something like turmeric extract because ‘it didn’t work for me,’ that news spreads like wildfire, and that’s the last thing you need. You’re going to tell somebody, ‘Hey, I took that thing that didn’t work,’ and that person is going to tell somebody else. We don’t want that.”
This is happening now, he said.
“There have been some shortcuts. There have been some reformulations. We don’t, on the ingredient side, do any kind of reformulation or reprocessing, but we’ve seen people pick up 20 percent assays.”
Lakshmikanthan has seen companies try similar shortcuts.
“In the end, the biggest thing this leads to is, of course, the trust deficit,” Lakshmikanthan said. “You may win over this particular challenge for a quarter, but they are losing out on their consumers in the long term.”
Other companies try substituting cheaper synthetic products for the natural products consumers expect. “We encouraged our partners (not to do this),” he said.
“The American consumers, they are the bosses,” he said. “We want to make sure the product we give to American consumers is meeting their efficacy standards.”
No new products
Lakshmikanthan said companies often rely on new products to boost sales, but the pricing uncertainty has stymied that strategy.
“Many of our brand customers who had planned to launch a new project deferred it because they are not sure at what price point they can (use),” he said.
For instance, many large companies planning to launch new products for cognitive health and sleep in January 2026 should have started production in October, Lakshmikanthan said.
“They all deferred,” waiting for the Supreme Court to rule.
Therefore, there was “no significant launch in the January quarter, which is normally a big quarter,” he said.
The tariffs didn’t hurt business right away, because companies like Natural Remedies and Sabinsa had several months’ worth of product already in the U.S. But as that inventory sold, cash-flow issues crept into the equation.
A cash-rich company could afford to wait to sell its product, but many companies are on a 30- or 60-day billing cycle, meaning they need to get paid sooner.
“It affects your investment back into the business,” Lakshmikanthan said. “Some folks had a big challenge managing their cash flows.”
Majeed said when Sabinsa brings product into the U.S., he has to write a check to the government within 22 days — often for more than $1 million for a shipload of containers. Then he sells to customers, who have 30 to 60 days to pay him. “I’m out of pocket,” he said.
From ‘just in time’ to ‘just in case’
As in so much of the business world, the supplement industry adopted “just in time” manufacturing over the past decade, Lakshmikanthan said. Companies anticipated consumers’ desires and timed their new products to when the farmers’ crops were harvested.
“With tariffs, the entire model on which this supply chain was built did not work,” Lakshmikanthan said. “Companies had to hold inventory. They had to move to a ‘just in case’ model.”
“What if the tariff changes?” he said. “What happens to the inventory you’re carrying there?”
Customers absorbed some of the tariff costs, while Natural Remedies and other suppliers absorbed the rest.
Majeed wishes he had been able to stockpile ingredients as the tariffs went into effect, but Sabinsa sold its products even before they reached U.S. shores.
“When a container comes in, it’s already sold,” Majeed said. “We just cannot make enough of it to sustain it sitting in our warehouse. Things like turmeric, ashwagandha, Boswellia — those things were so fast-moving. We just couldn’t ever keep stock of it.”
Conclusion: The biggest losers
Lakshmikanthan drew a sad conclusion: “In all of this back and forth with the tariffs, the biggest losers are the American consumers.”
Sure, companies struggled. But they struggled to get the right products to consumers.
“They are unfortunately not getting the best deal,” he said. “The new products are dated. They’re not getting the latest technology or any new innovations.”
