Fresh raspberries look, feel and taste great, but alas, all too soon they turn a squishy dark red and are best reserved for jams or the compost bin. The ephemeral raspberry, Canada’s eighth most important fruit in terms of sales in 2024, is ripening right now.
Raspberry sales approaching record levels, while cultivated area remains near a record low
The farm gate value of raspberries, that is, the money farmers receive for their crop, rose 9.9% to $36 million in 2024, the second-highest level in the time series and 5.1% below the record high set in 2016, when farmers received $38 million.
While farm gate prices approached record highs in 2024, raspberry cultivated area remained just above the record low set one year earlier, at 1,458 hectares. This was down 43.3% from one decade earlier and 61.6% lower than the beginning of the time series in 2002.
Most of Canada’s raspberry farms are located in British Columbia and Quebec
We counted 2,090 farms growing raspberries commercially during the 2021 Census of Agriculture. Raspberries were grown commercially in every province and Yukon in 2021, a testament to their hardiness.
About one-third (675 farms) of the farms reporting growing raspberries during the census were located in British Columbia, while 525 were located in Quebec and 489 in Ontario. There were a further 264 farms reporting growing raspberries commercially in the Prairie provinces, 133 in Atlantic Canada and 4 in Yukon.
During the 2024 growing season, farmers in British Columbia received a nation-leading $17.8 million for their raspberry crop, with farmers in Quebec ($12.1 million) and Ontario ($4.6 million) receiving the next-largest shares.
Availability of raspberries declining
Our food availability release, which tracks the amount of food physically present in a country for consumption, shows that 0.30 kilograms of frozen, fresh equivalent, raspberries were available per person for consumption in Canada in 2023, down from a high of 0.43 kilograms in 2020 and the lowest level of raspberry availability in over a decade.
By way of comparison, there were 1.94 kilograms of frozen, fresh equivalent, blueberries available per person.
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Contact information
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