Global supply chain management

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Jeff Reitmer, who's an associate professor of global supply chain management at Wayne State University.

And, um, he had, uh, some really interesting quotes in the Windsor Star earlier this week, and he joins us this morning.

Can you kind of walk us through what has happened here? Trump has kind of backtracked on rock salt tariffs because-

So Canada does have some leverage there.

And, uh, it would be interesting to see if some of that started happening later.

Jeff, as an associate professor of global supply chain management, has there ever been a more interesting time to, you know, uh, I, I don't know, to be an expert on [laughs] g- global supply chain management?

It, you know, teaching it, and it has given me a lot of examples in class to talk about and discuss and use to illustrate a lot of different topics that go along with what organizations have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

And I'm very happy to be back with an episode that's become a classic here at the FMCG Guys.

And it's our famous state of supply chain podcast where we review the state of global supply chains, international trade, logistics, which is something that I love because it really sits at the intersection between business that we really like, FMCG and so on, brands, et cetera, but also global affairs and politics.

And last week's episode, I don't last week's, not last year's episode is actually now one of the most downloaded episodes ever.

And of course, to do this episode of 2026, we needed to have the man himself who's here for his fourth appearance.

And this makes me somehow very, very satisfied every day when I close my laptop at the end of a long day.

Very cool, very cool.

So, you know, this episode, the idea is to have a bit of a fixed picture of what global supply chains are looking like right now, but I think it's always good to put things into context.

How would you define the events in the last year? Like what have been the main topics on the table in the last year for you? I can build

And our insight is quite simple.

If you want to understand global supply chains, you need to be inside them, not just study them from outside, especially if you want to understand the key players.

We are based in Ningbo, which is the largest port in the world for seventeen consecutive years.

The location is unique.

So logisticians and our professionals need to be prepared to manage those levels of uncertainty.

The consequences that this global impact in the macroeconomic sphere, the macropolitics sphere, is gonna create an impact in their local supply chains.

And the third one is you need to actually consider how globalization or global supply chains might, you know, like drive the future of the, of the discipline.

Because without that, uh, all the resources, all the commodities that we depend on are not located in, in developed countries.