Trump throws curveball at Japan tea giant's U.S. expansion swing

The company, which splashed out on a tie-up with Major League Baseball star Shohei Ohtani and launched a less bitter tea to capture a bigger slice of the lucrative growth market, is now debating whether to hike prices or move some production across the Pacific, executives said in interviews with Reuters. The dilemmas facing Ito En can be found across Japan, the biggest foreign investor in the United States, as Tokyo's trade negotiators returned to Washington this weekend to try and strike a deal to cushion the blow to its fragile economy. A survey of 3,000 Japanese companies by export promotion organization JETRO late last year before Trump's tariffs found the level of interest in U.S. markets at the highest in nearly a decade, with food and beverage companies like Ito En the most enthusiastic.