The french fry war

French fries, the staple reward for well-behaved kids and go-to comfort food for overworked grown-ups, may soon become more of a luxury treat.

While the US grows most of its own potatoes — about 44 billion pounds each year — there’s another french fry ingredient that we largely don’t produce on American soil, cooking oil. To achieve crispy fry perfection, most American chefs prefer canola or soybean oil. And much of our canola oil comes from Canada, which is being threatened by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The wide-reaching tariffs — at least 10% slapped on nearly every country from China to Sri Lanka — are panicking businesses and consumers as economists warn of rising prices for a laundry list of items: cars, T-shirts, smartphones, and vanilla, to name a few. Given the number of goods that pass over the Canadian border, the tariffs on that country pose an especially big threat, affecting $762 billion in annual trade. There’s already a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods not covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, including on covered goods such as steel, aluminum, and cars. Trump also implemented a 25% tariff on all USMCA-compliant goods on March 4, but delayed it a few days later. It’s still unclear what’s going to happen with the additional tariffs. But one potential victim is so near and dear to the heart of Americans that we attempted to change its name to “freedom fries” in the early 2000s after France came out against the Iraq War.

A good french fry is fried twice: first to blanche it, cooking it through most of the way so it becomes soft and creamy on the inside, and a second time, often at a higher heat, to get it crisp on the outside. They are beloved by restaurateurs because they cook quickly and bring in a higher profit margin than meat and other vegetables. The US Canola Association says 69% of the canola oil we use in America is imported — of that, some 96% comes from Canada. We also import about $1.7 billion worth of frozen french fries — like the ones served by most fast-food restaurants — from Canada. For the past five years, the US has imported more frozen fries than it has produced. All this has been free of tariffs, thanks to the USMCA and the North American Free Trade Agreement before it.

“While they may be considered a nonluxury item, they do use what is now pricing itself to be a luxury mechanism to deliver them to the table,” Codi Bates says about fries. She spends $32,760 a year on canola oil for her Lawrence, Kansas, restaurant, The Burger Stand. Between fried chicken, fried fish, and french fries, the business uses 630 pounds of cooking oil a week. A price hike would cut deeply into her profit margins. If the tariffs on USMCA-compliant goods hit, she doesn’t know what she’ll do.

Plenty of other restaurants are also bracing for impact.

Americans eat a lot of fries. One-third of the potatoes grown in the US become frozen fries. In 2023, of the billions of times people visited US restaurants, at least one person at the table or bar ordered fries nearly 14% of the time, the market research group Circana, formerly NPD Group, found.

For decades, restaurants used tallow, or rendered beef fat, to cook fries. It was responsible for the signature, rich taste of McDonald’s fries as well as those from other major chains like Arby’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s. Then, amid the demonization of fats (later discovered to be funded by the sugar industry), we invented an alternative. Canola, short for Canadian oil, low acid, is made from the rapeseed plant, which was originally used to light lamps and lubricate machinery. After World War II, there was less need for machine oil, and Canadian researchers tried to find another use for the crop, which Canada leads the world in producing. They eventually created the edible and shelf-stable product we use today. By the ’90s, the fast-food giants swapped their tallow supply for canola, often blended with other oils.

There’s going to be some economic pain if these tariffs stay in place for a sustained period of time.

French fries are crucial in how many restaurants balance their budgets. Ingredients for a typical burger might cost a restaurant about 30% of its menu price, but fries are closer to 20%. Even before Trump began implementing tariffs, the food industry was struggling — as food prices rose, people started spending less, eating out less, and buying fewer fries. In October, Lamb Weston, which says it supplies 80% of America’s fast-food fries, closed a production plant in Washington, reducing its production by about 5%.

Even as fry consumption has dropped, restaurants have relied on the menu staple to balance out the skyrocketing costs of other ingredients, like beef (up over 40% in the past five years) and eggs (up nearly 100% over the same period). A major increase in the cost of cooking oil, which has already jumped roughly 50% in cost since 2020, is likely to cause a crisis for your side of fries.

“The price of canola will rise, and that price increase will be passed along to all the different participants along the value chain — from the wholesale buyers to the restaurateurs to the final consumer,” says Henry An, a professor and the chair of the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta.

An believes that both countries will bear some of the burden. “The canola sector in Canada doesn’t have many short-term options when it comes to finding new buyers, and crop planting decisions have already been made for the most part. There’s going to be some economic pain if these tariffs stay in place for a sustained period of time.”

It’s hard to say how much the price of fries might increase — importers may choose to absorb some of the cost instead of passing it on to their restaurant customers, and restaurants can choose to absorb costs or pivot their supply network to avoid increasing the price for diners. But some costs will inevitably trickle down: During the five-year period that vegetable oil prices rose by 50%, the average menu price of McDonald’s french fries went up 134%, from $1.79 in 2019 to $4.19 in 2024, TheStreet found in an analysis. To be sure, rising labor costs and inflation also played a role.

Restaurateurs have three choices to deal with significant cost increases: eat the cost and make less profit, pass the cost on to customers by raising menu prices, or change ingredients.

A return to animal fats has been embraced by chefs over the past two decades, and more may follow suit. Amid a recent backlash to seed oil, the National Restaurant Association says there’s been increased interest in tallow from their members. But it’s not a cost-saving solution. A 35-pound bucket can range from $60 to $119, while the same amount of canola or soybean oil averages $40. Some pricier restaurants fry their fries in duck fat, which is even more expensive. Duckfat, a restaurant in Portland, uses duck fat and charges $8 for a small fry.

Shifting to animal fats would transform fries from an everyday indulgence, something added to a child’s meal without much thought, into a special treat, from the league of pizza and hot dogs to the ranks of lattes and avocado toast.

Instead of avoiding canola, some restaurants might start to stretch its use. Cooks usually keep an eye on fryer oil, and once it’s too cloudy with bits of food or is breaking down from excessive use, they will drain the fryers. Each time oil is used, the smoke point lowers, eventually giving off an unpleasant smell and taste, producing darker food, and emitting more smoke. But there are ways that restaurants can extend the life of their oil without making the food taste bad. Samantha Fore’s oil supplier has the fryer at her restaurant Tuk Tuk Snack Shop in Lexington, Kentucky, hooked up to two tanks. One extracts bad oil, and the other pumps in fresh stuff as needed. The used oil is picked up by the supplier and transformed into biofuel.

Between the potential of what could happen to oil and wine, it’s enough to put any restaurant owner into a little bit of a tailspin.

The majority soybean oil blend she uses costs her about $15,000 a year. Even though her supplier uses domestic oil, she’s nervous that the tax on imported oil could drive up the demand and price of domestic oil.

“Between the potential of what could happen to oil and wine, it’s enough to put any restaurant owner into a little bit of a tailspin,” Fore says. But she can’t keep raising prices. “People aren’t going to want to pay 15 bucks for a side of french fries,” she says. “There’s a market sensitivity there that we might not be able to meet.”

Instead, she’ll have to reconsider her menu or purchasing options. “It’s what we’ve had to do with eggs,” she says. “To see this much volatility and not be able to forecast effectively, the little decisions have such a huge domino effect on how we survive in a very uncertain time.”

Catherine Mendelsohn, the chief operating officer of Sunnyside Restaurant Group, says her company also uses a machine to help extend the life of cooking oil at the burger and fry shop Good Stuff Eatery. The restaurant’s $35,000 three-chamber fryer has a filtering system that cleans the oil during operation and reduces cooking oil costs. Even though Good Stuff spends about $10,000 a year on canola at each location, Mendelsohn isn’t worried about tariffs.

“For the fries, it’s not a big hit,” she says. “Countries have to protect their borders. If that’s a reason for the tariffs, temporarily until things get under control, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” She plans to absorb the cost of any increases.

The Washington, DC-based restaurant group Knead Hospitality + Design operates 10 restaurants, four of which use an estimated 1,200 pounds each of canola oil a month to make fries. Christian Plotczyk, its director of culinary operations, says the company has a contract with a guaranteed price for oil through the end of 2025. But if tariffs are still in place by then, it would have to look at switching oils.

Demetri Tsolakis, the CEO of Xenia Greek Hospitality, also prefers to try a different oil rather than raise prices. He says the company spends $123,760 a year on canola oil for fryers at its seven restaurants around Boston. If the tariffs on canola oil happen, he might switch to sugarcane oil, which costs twice as much as canola but can last up to four times as long in his fryer’s advanced filtration system (he calls it “the Cadillac of fryers”).

The trouble with trying out alternative oils, though, is that there may not be enough supply for every restaurant making fries in canola to easily swap. Industry experts are already sounding the alarm about the lack of beef tallow supply in the US, and given how much canola is used, it’s easy to imagine a similar issue if restaurants all try to switch to soybean, sugarcane, or some other oil. Canola also provides a mouthwatering golden color to fries that other oils fail to achieve, so a change could disappoint diners.

At this stage, it’s impossible to know how everything will shake out. “Economists like to predict things,” An of the University of Alberta says, “but even we are sensible enough to admit that we don’t really have a clue what’s going to unfold.” For now, Trump’s trade war is poised to make freedom fries far from free.

Corey Mintz is a food reporter focusing on the intersection of food, economics, and labor. He is also the author of “The Next Supper: The End Of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After.”