Nobody Asked About the Other Ten
Commerce opened the first administrative review of the vanillin order from China today, and exactly one company is in it: the exporter it refused a separate rate to last year. Chinese vanillin fell from $52.5m to $1.7m in one year and the rest of your book got 44 percent more expensive.
Two lines apart in today's Federal Register, Commerce opened administrative reviews on two orders covering Chinese ingredient chemistry.
The xanthan gum line names ten companies. Fufeng, Meihua, Deosen, Jianlong, the whole fermentation bench.
The vanillin line names one.
"When a first review of a brand-new order draws exactly one respondent, who put them there and what are they trying to get?"
The order is A-570-172, in force since July 28, 2025. The period of review runs January 16, 2025 through June 30, 2026, seventeen and a half months, because a first review reaches all the way back to the date suspension of liquidation began.
And the single company under examination is Jiaxing Guihua Imp. & Exp. Co., Ltd.
Nobody requested a review of the ten exporters who actually have rates. Nobody requested a review of the companion countervailing duty order at all.
What the order already did
Chinese vanillin was a $52.5 million line into the United States in 2024, and 2,874 tonnes of it. In 2025 it was $1.7 million and 158 tonnes (chart below).
That is a 96.8% fall in customs value in a single year, on a trade that had never dropped below $31.9 million in the decade before it.
Ethylvanillin, which the scope also covers, did the same thing on a smaller base: $7.7 million down to $0.5 million.
So the duty worked exactly the way a 190 percent duty works. The question a formulator cares about is what filled the hole, and at what price.
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