How to override state's non-food tax rate for food products?

Accounting & Taxes

Topic summary

Goal: apply a reduced food tax rate (4%) instead of the default state rate (9.25%) via Products Override in Shopify Taxes.

Key finding: only manual collections (hand-curated product lists) appear in the tax override selector; automated collections (rule-based) are not supported. The “Home page” collection shows because it’s a manual collection.

Implementation guidance:

  • Create a manual collection containing all products that need the food tax rate.
  • If all variants of a product need the override, add the product to the manual collection; the override will apply to all its variants.
  • If only some variants need the override, Shopify cannot target variants in collections. The workaround is to split those variants into separate products and add only the needed ones to the manual collection.

Operational impact: for stores with many products/variants, maintaining a manual collection can be tedious. Feedback about this limitation was submitted to Shopify developers.

Open question: how to handle varying qualified food tax rates by ZIP code, and whether an app can manage this. No solution was provided in the thread; the question remains unanswered.

Status: partially resolved (manual collection requirement and variant behavior clarified); ZIP code variation unresolved.

Summarized with AI on December 25. AI used: gpt-5.
4

Thanks for your detailed reply and further explanation of your store and products. Sorry to hear that the process will be so cumbersome for you to create this override. As I mentioned, I have already submitted this feedback to our developers on your behalf.

To clarify, you have products that contain variants where not all variants need this specific tax override, is that correct? This is why you’ve stated that you need to create new products for each variant. Just would like to confirm this statement before confirming your posted next steps.

If yes, the reason you can’t add products that contain variants to this new manual collection for the tax override is not all variants require the override, then your listed steps are correct. As it’s not possible to only add specific variants to a collection, as you mentioned.

However, if this is not the case, you shouldn’t need to create new products for the variants if all variants will require the override. When you add a product with variants to the manual collection, and then add the tax override to the collection, all variants contained in that product will now have the assigned tax override.

Let me know if you need any further clarification here!