Food imports are a major part of the U.S. food supply, but their scale differs sharply by category. In 2025, U.S. food imports totaled $207,856.302 million, including $139,557.502 million in plant-based foods, $50,843.1 million in animal-category foods, and $17,455.7 million in beverages. These figures come from the USDA Economic Research Service’s Summary data on annual food imports, values and volume by food category and source country.
Contents
- How large are U.S. food imports?
- Meat, seafood, and animal products
- Fruit and vegetables
- Coffee, grains, oils, cocoa, and beverages
- Where imported food comes from
- Food imports in consumer spending and agricultural trade
How large are U.S. food imports?
The 2025 total shows how broad the U.S. import basket is. Plant-based foods accounted for $139,557.502 million, while animal-category foods accounted for $50,843.1 million. Beverage imports added $17,455.7 million. These are category values for 2025; they should not be read as a forecast or as a measure of physical volume.
The USDA data also report selected physical quantities. Imports of live meat animals totaled 19,879.9 thousand animals, and their value was $3,005.0 million. Meat imports totaled 2,804.8 thousand metric tons. Fish and shellfish imports totaled 2,916.9 thousand metric tons. For fruit, the reported volume was 15,761.4 thousand metric tons.
| 2025 U.S. import measure | Reported amount |
|---|---|
| All food imports | $207,856.302 million |
| Plant-based food imports | $139,557.502 million |
| Animal-category food imports | $50,843.1 million |
| Beverage imports | $17,455.7 million |
| Meat imports | 2,804.8 thousand metric tons |
| Fish and shellfish imports | 2,916.9 thousand metric tons |
The value and volume measures answer different questions. A high dollar value can reflect product mix and prices, while a high tonnage describes physical movement. Because the categories and units differ, comparisons are most useful when the measure is kept explicit.
Meat, seafood, and animal products
Fresh and frozen red meats were a $16,868.0 million import category in 2025. Fresh or chilled red-meat imports totaled $7,755.1 million, and frozen red-meat and parts imports totaled $7,495.6 million. Prepared-meat imports contributed another $2,044.1 million.
Seafood imports were larger by reported value. Fish and shellfish imports totaled $25,580.8 million in 2025. Within that category, shellfish imports totaled $9,055.7 million, while fish-fillets and mince imports totaled $7,394.9 million. The USDA’s physical-volume measure for fish and shellfish was 2,916.9 thousand metric tons.
Animal-product figures also include live animals and eggs. Live meat animals totaled $3,005.0 million and 19,879.9 thousand animals. Live bovine-animal imports alone totaled $2,094.8 million. Bird-egg imports totaled $243.4 million. These values cover distinct product groupings, so the live-animal amount should not be added to meat tonnage as though it were processed meat.
For food-safety readers, these distinctions matter because an import statistic can describe a live animal, a fresh or frozen product, a prepared product, or a seafood grouping. The source labels identify the product scope; they do not by themselves describe inspection outcomes, contamination rates, or the safety performance of any country or category.
Fruit and vegetables
Fruit and fruit preparations totaled $30,471.1 million in 2025. Fresh or chilled fruit accounted for $20,108.5 million. Banana and plantain imports totaled $2,923.1 million, while dried, prepared, or preserved fruit totaled $4,713.0 million. Fruit-juice imports totaled $4,251.3 million. The reported physical volume for fruit imports was 15,761.4 thousand metric tons.
Vegetable and vegetable-preparation imports totaled $19,083.9 million. Fresh vegetables accounted for $11,334.8 million, and prepared or preserved vegetables accounted for $5,617.8 million. The source presents these as related but separate groupings, so the subcategories should be treated according to their labels rather than assumed to be interchangeable.
The source-country detail shows that fruit imports were concentrated among several suppliers in 2025. Mexico supplied $11,086.9 million of U.S. fruit and fruit-preparation imports, Peru supplied $3,298.8 million, and Chile supplied $2,341.0 million. For vegetables and vegetable preparations, Mexico supplied $8,713.4 million and Canada supplied $5,182.6 million.
These are import values for the named category and year. They do not state that all products from a country share one production method, risk profile, or regulatory history. They show the value of food entering the U.S. category from the listed source country.
Coffee, grains, oils, cocoa, and beverages
Coffee, tea, and spices totaled $16,811.4 million in 2025. Unroasted coffee beans accounted for $10,305.4 million, and spices accounted for $1,973.3 million. Within unroasted coffee beans, Colombia supplied $2,648.3 million and Brazil supplied $2,472.2 million of U.S. imports.
Grain and grain-product imports totaled $20,400.0 million. Cereal and bakery-food imports totaled $15,489.3 million. Vegetable-oil imports reached $10,563.7 million, including $9,095.5 million in refined vegetable oils. The refined-oil figure is a product subset and should be read alongside, not as an independent replacement for, the broader vegetable-oil category.
Cocoa and cocoa-product imports totaled $13,064.8 million. Chocolate imports accounted for $5,725.0 million. These figures illustrate how a broad ingredient category and a more specific finished-product category can appear in the same dataset with different scopes.
Beverage imports totaled $17,455.7 million by value and 9,845.7 thousand liters of pure alcohol equivalent by the reported volume measure. Wine imports totaled $6,626.1 million, and liquor and liqueur imports totaled $8,446.9 million. The pure-alcohol-equivalent measure is not the same as total beverage liquid volume, so it should not be compared with food tonnage without preserving the unit definition.
Where imported food comes from
The source-country figures vary by product category rather than identifying one overall supplier ranking for all U.S. food imports. Canada supplied $2,438.3 million of U.S. live-animal imports in 2025, while Mexico supplied $323.3 million. For fish and shellfish, Canada supplied $4,255.9 million, Chile supplied $2,875.1 million, and India supplied $2,562.8 million.
| Product category | Selected source country | 2025 import value |
|---|---|---|
| Live animals | Canada | $2,438.3 million |
| Live animals | Mexico | $323.3 million |
| Fruit and fruit preparations | Mexico | $11,086.9 million |
| Fruit and fruit preparations | Peru | $3,298.8 million |
| Vegetables and preparations | Mexico | $8,713.4 million |
| Vegetables and preparations | Canada | $5,182.6 million |
| Fish and shellfish | Canada | $4,255.9 million |
| Unroasted coffee beans | Colombia | $2,648.3 million |
The same country can have a different position across categories because food supply chains are product-specific. Mexico’s reported value was $11,086.9 million for fruit and fruit preparations and $8,713.4 million for vegetables and vegetable preparations, while Canada’s reported value was $5,182.6 million for vegetables and $4,255.9 million for fish and shellfish. These values describe the selected categories and do not establish total bilateral food trade.
Food imports in consumer spending and agricultural trade
The USDA Economic Research Service reported that U.S. consumers spent $2.92 trillion on food and beverages in 2023. In the ERS chart Imports accounted for less than 20 percent of U.S. food and beverage spending in 2023, direct imports represented 15% of purchases. Domestic supply chains produced 85% of purchases, and embedded imports covered 4% of the domestically produced portion.
The direct-import and domestic-supply figures describe the composition of 2023 consumer spending, not the 2025 import values listed above. Embedded imports are also a different concept from direct imports: they refer to imported inputs within the domestically produced portion. Keeping those definitions separate prevents the percentages from being treated as a single additive measure of import value.
Longer-term agricultural trade data provide another frame. The ERS Agriculture made up 6 percent of total U.S. import value in FY 2023 reports that the value of U.S. agricultural imports rose an inflation-adjusted average of 3.7% annually from FY 2004 through FY 2023. Agricultural imports were 6.3% of total U.S. import value in 2023, compared with 4.3% in 2004.
The fiscal-year trend and the calendar-year food-category values measure different populations and periods. Together, they show the scale of imported food and agricultural products from two perspectives: detailed 2025 product categories, and the longer-term role of agricultural imports in total U.S. trade.