How much hassle is it to bring food into the US?

Upvote:0

[This assumes your business is not to sell chocolates]

You will need to list the chocolates you plan to gift on your customs declaration, with an estimated value, and if your total (with all other things you plan to leave in the US) is over the limit, you will have to pay customs duty, which will take some time.
If you are below the limits (about 400$, not sure what the latest value is), nobody cares, and you just walk by; delay is zero seconds.
However, you could always get picked for a random searching. From my experience, bringing chocolate doesn't affect this positively or negatively.

Packaged chocolates have no other limit (aside from your luggage weight limits), and count as 'food'. Note that liquor-filled chocolates are quite a different topic!

Upvote:2

When you declare the chocolates you will likely be sent to agricultural inspection. However, at least at the time we typically arrive, this is very short. Your bags go through an x-ray, they may ask you to open some of them so they can look at anything the x-ray picked out as being of possible interest. I don't believe it has ever added even 10 minutes to the process.

We normally save a bit of hassle by ensuring everything that might draw the x-ray's eye is in one bag, this limits the amount of unpacking needed. In our experience the x-ray notes things which are organic in nature and have a density in the ballpark of water.

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