Before most of New York City wakes up, its seafood supply chain is already in full swing. At the New Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point, business starts at 2 a.m. and wraps up by 7 a.m. In that five-hour window, vendors move nearly half of the city’s seafood, salmon from Scotland, shrimp from Thailand and branzini from Turkey, all across the tri-state area.
The pace is breakneck. Forklifts screech past stacks of ice-packed pallets. Buyers haggle in bursts of Spanish, Greek and Mandarin. And by 7 a.m., it’s all over: the seafood is gone, the floors are hosed down, and a full day’s business has come and gone before you’ve even had your morning coffee.
The seafood industry, more than many others, is global by necessity. Geography, climate and sustainability regulations make it impossible to source everything locally, especially at scale. But in the age of Trump, the result is a local market besieged by international politics.
This is where chefs, grocers and fishmongers shop. Nearly half of New York City’s seafood moves through these floors, but this year, everyone’s paying more: A new wave of tariffs, announced by President Trump in early 2025, targets seafood from some of the world’s largest exporters. These duties include a universal 10% tariff on nearly all imports, already in effect. On top of that, seafood from China now faces a 40% total tariff, wiping out much of the tilapia market; India is hit with 36%, affecting the abundant Indian shrimp sold here; and Thailand faces 46% tariffs, with negotiations still ongoing despite its huge footprint in shrimp and white fish at the market.
Prices are already rising across the board, but vendors warn it could get much worse if the higher rates kick in, pushing more products off the market and seafood even further out of reach for New Yorkers. What happens in the early hours at Hunts Point affects the rest of the day in New York. Chefs adjust menus. Grocers raise prices. Households buy less fish, or none at all.
(Lochlain Healy) New Fulton Fish Market
And that’s why these vendors aren’t just shouting over ice machines or hauling crates. They’re issuing a warning: the system that keeps seafood fresh and affordable is fraying, fast.
At the moment, there’s no clear off-ramp for these new tariffs. But their impact is becoming harder to ignore, not just in Hunts Point, but on your plate.
Peter Kouzilos runs Eurofish Seafood Corp., and his product line is typical of the market. “All the items I sell, the overwhelming majority, I would say, are imported,” he said. That means even the lowest new tariff of 10% hits everything. “So at a minimum, I’m facing a 10% across-the-board increase. That full 10% is being passed on to the customers.”
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“If that goes to 20% or higher… It’s gonna kill off items,” said Kouzilos.
Margins here have always been thin. “If you can make 8% as a margin, that’s a lot,” he explained. Now, vendors are being asked to absorb new taxes and maintain volume, a near-impossible feat when prices drive customers away.
That’s already happened with Kouzilos’ Egyptian corvina and wild branzini. “That killed the item,” he said. “To now try to reestablish it; it’s gonna take a lot of money… long term, I just don’t see that happening.”
It’s not just Kouzilos. Across the market, buyers and sellers alike are scrambling. From salmon out of Scotland to shrimp from Southeast Asia, vendors say they’re watching costs creep up and options narrow.
“There isn’t really any solution,” said Stephen Julich, co-owner of Crown Fish Company. “A lot of the stuff that we sell can’t be produced in the United States.” His inventory list is long: “Frozen shrimp, tilapia, Chilean sea bass, mahi mahi tuna, literally everything that comes from out of the country.”
“The alternatives would be to go buy chicken or steak,” he added.
And while steak and chicken have domestic supply chains with deep subsidies, seafood doesn’t. That makes it not just more vulnerable to foreign policy but also less affordable overall.
Restaurants like Telly’s Taverna in Queens are already passing on the costs. “Fish is market price,” said owner Dianna Loiselle. “So if a fish is $10 more, we’re charging $10 more.”
Inflation is visible across the dining scene and in the seafood aisle. Whether you’re shopping at a neighborhood market or dining out, a protein once prized for its health benefits is inching out of reach for many working families.
“The alternatives would be to go buy chicken or steak.”
Steven Laureano, who works at Universal Seafood, puts it bluntly: “I could bring in as much fish as I f**king want, but no one’s gonna be able to spend on it, if you can’t afford it.”
Universal’s margins are already stressed. “We got a huge staff. We got a large payroll, a lot of overhead… we gotta average at least 15 to 20%,” Laureano said. “There’s nothing we can do, my brother, but just enjoy the ride.”
Some products from Canada have avoided the new tariffs, for now, thanks to the USMCA free trade agreement, which exempts Canadian and Mexican imports, including seafood, from the recent Trump-era hikes. Laureano, for example, relies heavily on imports from Canada: “Let’s say my arctic char, my cod loins.”
If USMCA protections were to disappear, those staples would quickly become unaffordable. He’s already seeing the effects elsewhere. “My Norwegian fish and my Scottish fish,” he said, “those are the ones that’s being affected.”
Laureano even pointed to history. “We weren’t around for the first time this tariff was implemented,” he said, referencing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. “And you see when they first attempted to do it, s**t didn’t work. We called it a recession.”
As suppliers scramble to call new vendors or reroute supply lines, it’s clear that no one has a foolproof plan. “Everyone’s trying to find their own alternatives,” he said, “but there’s no going around it.”
Tariffs are supposed to encourage local buying. But when domestic alternatives are few and expensive, the policy creates more scarcity than protection. And many vendors don’t see any upside, only pressure.
“As soon as the tax goes away, prices will come down, but not a second sooner,” Kouzilos said. “The higher the prices, the less likely somebody’s gonna buy it.”
