Tariff Stacking Is Rewiring Supply Chain Execution

The 2025 tariff environment wasn’t a policy adjustment — it was a structural break. That’s the core finding from Infios‘ new report, The Rise of the Tariff-Optimized Supply Chain, which draws on millions of U. S. customs entries to map how companies responded to a tariff environment.

The report lands at a moment when importers across categories are still grappling with duty rates that, for some product lines, have stacked into the 20%-to-80% range – multiple duties (a universal baseline, country-specific adjustments, Section 301, and IEEPA tariffs) layered on the same product.

Don Mabry, SVP of Global Trade Solutions at Infios, joined FreightWaves to walk through the findings and what they mean for companies still trying to get their arms around this environment. The research frames tariff exposure as a live variable that now sits alongside freight cost, lead time, and service level as a core planning input.

That’s a departure from how most supply chains operated before 2018, when duties were a background cost that companies simply absorbed. “Mode selection, entry structuring, even where you warehouse — all those were operational and financial decisions, and tariffs sat quietly in the background as a P&L line item,” Mabry said. That’s no longer the case.

The Infios data shows the 35-to-50% duty bracket grew more than tenfold, while the 50%-plus bracket went from effectively zero to tens of thousands of entries. In that environment, Mabry said, importers stopped treating duties as something to accept and started treating them as something to design around. “They don’t accept the duty bill.

They design around it,” he said, citing the report’s central finding. [Credit: Infios] The shift showed up across three dimensions. Mode selection, once driven purely by cost and service tradeoffs, now reflects tariff risk at the entry level.

Landed cost planning, which used to start near zero for duties, now bakes in a 10-to-20% baseline assumption from the outset. Compliance, once a back-end checkpoint, has become a strategic lever that actively shapes routes, modes, and entry structures. “Traditional supply chains were linear systems built for stability,” Mabry said.

“But the tariff-optimized supply chain is adaptive. It’s built for change.” The report identifies two distinct phases of importer response. Wave one was reactive, with a surge of route testing, mode switching, and pull-forward activity driven by urgency more than strategy. Mexico’s origin share jumped 5. 2 percentage points, Canada rose 1.

0 percentage point, and experimental trade corridors involving countries like Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ireland, and Switzerland appeared suddenly. But most of those gains were short-lived. By the second half of the year, Mexico’s surge had halved to roughly 2. 0 percentage points and Canada’s to 0. 4.

That pattern is less reshoring and more panic-driven route testing. Air and truck share spiked as urgency overrode cost discipline, and the numbers told a story of an import community iterating as fast as it could just to keep pace with a shifting policy environment..

“When de minimis (the value threshold below which low-value shipments cleared without a formal customs filing) was removed, Canadian informal entries jumped by 79% — literally overnight,” Mabry said. “They went from 34,000 to 61,000, and that’s the signature of a cost environment that is changing faster than any planning cycle could absorb.”

Wave two was where the durable shifts emerged. China’s loss of origin share held (down 2. 8 percentage points in the full May-to-December window, 2. 2 in the more stable July-to-December period). The shift was not uniform.

Elastic categories, including consumer goods, low-complexity electronics, and light manufacturing, saw genuine diversification away from China.

Inelastic categories, such as specialty chemicals, rare earth products, and certain industrial components remained China-dependent, revealing that the decline in origin share reflects a segmentation of the supply base according to what can and cannot be substituted.

Air freight’s gain of approximately 12 percentage points and truck’s gain of eight didn’t reverse. Ocean freight declined 10 to 12 percentage points and did not rebound. Bonded warehouse usage climbed from around 10% of entries to 16–18% and kept rising into the second half.

Harmonized Trade System classification complexity nearly doubled, moving from about six sequences per entry to 11. 6, and stayed there. Total entered value rose roughly 78% while entry counts fell 7%. Importers were consolidating into fewer, higher-value shipments rather than simply shipping less.

[Credit: Infios] Mabry distinguished between adaptation and optimization. “We’re not claiming companies optimized their tariff position back in 2025,” he said. “What the data captures is the early stages of active management. True optimization still lies ahead.” The durable changes, he argued, were not sourcing decisions. “Smarter classification, delib