American Consumers and Farmers Depend on These Plant-Based Ingredients. There Is No Substitute.
A beef tallow fatty acids producer named Vantage Specialty Chemicals filed a trade petition seeking crippling tariffs on plant-based ingredients that aren't found in America.
The Coalition of Affordable Ingredients (CAI) is the coalition of American consumer-goods manufacturers, farmers, and employers organized to defeat it.
What We're Up Against
One Company Made Bad Business Decisions; It Wants Millions of Consumers to Pay
In January 2026, Vantage Specialty Chemicals, Inc.—a single U.S. tallow-based producer—filed antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) petitions before the U.S. International Trade Commission, targeting imports of plant-based ingredients from Indonesia and Malaysia.
These inputs are essential to everyday products in millions of American homes—from personal care and household cleaners to food and the animal feed that sustains U.S. dairy farms.
Not a flash in the pan. These duties could remain in place for at least five years, with costs falling directly on American downstream manufacturers, farmers, workers, and consumers.
94%
These duties could remain in place for at least five years, with costs falling directly on American downstream manufacturers, farmers, workers, and consumers.
The petition seeks tariffs of 94% on imports from Malaysia and up to 72% on those from Indonesia.
When it comes down to it, the case is deficient in both the facts and the law.
Vantage cannot make the majority of the products it seeks to protect, and it has failed to cooperate with the Commission's information requests.
Vantage Fell Behind the Market and Filed for Tariffs Instead of Adapting
The Coalition for Affordable Ingredients believes Vantage filed this petition to recover through tariffs what it lost in the market through its own poor business decisions.
As consumer demand shifted to kosher, halal, and vegan certifications, Vantage stayed dependent on beef tallow while competitors adapted.
What Does Vantage have to say for themselves?
In the first hearing before the ITC, Vantage's own executives acknowledged the shift in consumer preference as a challenge, to which a lack of responsiveness led to lost market share. Now they seek to make American manufacturers, farmers, workers, and consumers pay for what their own witness conceded was a self-inflicted wound.