Cranberry Consumption in the U.S.
About 400 million pounds.
Cranberry Consumption Facts
That’s a lot of berries.
Each barrel weighs about 100 lbs so if my math is right that would mean U.S. farmers produce about 4 million barrels each season, and pick them within 3 months …
… by hand!
(Kidding, they flood their crops and scoop up the millions of berries that float on the water’s surface with modern farming equipment.)
Try to picture 4 million barrels of cranberries and how massive of an area they would take up. Now imagine that over half of them come from the lowly old state of Wisconsin, which nobody outside the cranberry world would ever have guessed they were capable of. [That state is becoming more badass by the day.]
First their cheese and now this. It might not be a bad idea to spend some time there on your next road trip, and soak up some of that alpha energy the farmers are emanating that everybody wants.
Now back to cranberry facts. So 400 million pounds per year, and almost 1/4 of that consumed for Thanksgiving alone. You gotta wonder if UTIs go down for the weeks following the holiday, might be worth looking into.
Out of that 400 million pounds, some are used to make canned cranberry sauce with a total production of 70 million cans/year. Enough for about 1 in every 4 Americans which means you should buy yours early to avoid canned, cranberry sauce Black Friday madness. It’s a real thing in certain corners of the continent and would make a great spectator sport.
Harvesting Cranberries
MONEY
The total dollar value of U.S. cranberry production is approximately $292 million.
The majority, about 95 percent of this, is from processed cranberries. Processed cranberries are used for juice, sauces and cranberry products. The other 5% are fresh cranberries that you buy in those 12oz bags at the grocery store.
Hope you learned something today; the country has berries galore, Wisconsin is fun, and the potential exists for a black market cranberry trade – just in case you need a side hustle.
Trivia: “How many cranberries does an individual vine yield?”
– Cranby
