Chapter 9 covers coffee, tea, mate, and spices, and the headings are short enough to memorize: 0901 is coffee, whether or not roasted or decaffeinated, including coffee husks and skins and coffee substitutes containing coffee; 0902 is tea, whether or not flavored; 0903 is mate; 0904 is pepper. The chapter notes add the structure: coffee covers the bean in its various states, tea covers the leaf, and the processing the product has undergone decides the subheading.
The simplicity is deceptive. A shipment that is coffee in one state and a preparation in another can sit in two headings, and the duty difference between them is real. The classification question is always the same: what did the processing do to the product, and which heading describes the result?
Green coffee and roasted coffee sit in different subheadings under 0901, and decaffeinated coffee gets its own subheading in each state. The roast is the classification event: green coffee, not roasted and not decaffeinated, is 0901.11; decaffeinated green is 0901.12; roasted, not decaffeinated, is 0901.21; roasted and decaffeinated is 0901.22. An importer who files green coffee as roasted has the wrong subheading, the wrong duty, and an entry that will not survive a CBP review.
Tea works the same way. Green tea is unfermented, black tea is fermented, and the tariff gives them separate subheadings under 0902. A tea that is partly fermented, an oolong, sits between the two, and the classification turns on how far the fermentation went. The processing step is the classification step, and the paperwork has to describe the processing accurately, because CBP classifies on the goods as imported, not on the goods as the importer wishes they were.
Blends are where chapter 9 importers lose money. A tea blended with fruit or herbs is still tea if the tea predominates, but a blend where the fruit or the herb is the point can leave the chapter. Coffee substitutes are the classic trap: roasted chicory and other roasted substitutes are not coffee, and they do not belong in 0901. They belong in the heading for what they actually are, and filing them as coffee is a misclassification, not a judgment call.
Extracts are the other exit from the chapter. Coffee extracts, essences, and concentrates, tea extracts, and mate extracts all go to heading 2101, which covers extracts, essences, and concentrates of coffee, tea, or mate, and preparations based on them. Instant coffee is a 2101 product, not a 0901 product, and the duty follows the heading. The rule is simple to state and easy to get wrong in practice: chapter 9 covers the bean and the leaf. Once the product is an extract, a substitute, or a preparation, it has left the chapter, and the entry has to follow it.
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Green coffee beans fall under heading 0901. Not roasted and not decaffeinated is subheading 0901.11; decaffeinated green coffee is 0901.12. The roast state decides the subheading before anything else does.
Roasted coffee substitutes such as chicory fall outside chapter 9. Chapter 9 covers coffee, tea, mate, and spices in their natural or simply processed forms. Once the product becomes a substitute or an extract, it leaves the chapter for the heading that covers what it actually is.
Processing. Green tea is unfermented, black tea is fermented, and the tariff gives them separate subheadings under 0902. The fermentation step is the classification step, and a tea that is partly fermented sits between the two, which is where the classification arguments start.
No. Extracts, essences, and concentrates of coffee, tea, or mate go to heading 2101, which covers extracts and preparations. The chapter 9 heading covers the bean and the leaf. Once the product is an extract, it is a preparation, and the tariff treats it as one.