Start Stocking Up! There Could Be a Canned-Pumpkin Shortage This Fall

Crop experts warn that by Thanksgiving there may be a significant shortage in canned pumpkin, and urge people to stock up immediately if they want to enjoy pumpkin pies this year.

“I would not wait until November. 20 [to buy canned pumpkin]”, University of Illinois professor Mohammad Babadoost told the Associated Press.

At a Senate roundtable last week on climate change and food production, Nestle’s president of corporate affairs Paul Bakus spoke of declines in Libby’s pumpkin harvests. Jane Moran, who owns Jane’s Orchard in Illinois, says the torrential rains destroyed her pumpkins, which typically grow best in cool, dry weather.

Heavy rains early in the growing season led to an abundance of moisture in the hot summer months, which bred phytophthora blight and downy mildew throughout the pumpkin patches.

In addition to being hard to find later this fall, the shortage may cause prices to increase if retailers continue to get their pumpkins from Illinois due to demand exceeding supply, reports the Orlando Weekly. It appears the Midwest got a record amount of rainfall in June, enough to flood fields and rot out farmers’ pumpkin crops.

As Moran conceded, “When you deal with Mother Nature, you just have to take it and go on”.

O’Hearn said Libby’s originally reported that its yield could be off by as much as a third, “but updated crop reports indicate yields will be reduced by half this year”, she said in a statement. Most pumpkins are processed into canned pumpkin and canned pie mix.

The pumpkins Libby’s uses for canning aren’t suited for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns: they’re oval-shaped, pale orange and heavy, with a dense, meaty interior, according to O’Hearn. The general USA pumpkin market is known to be highly limited and very season-specific, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.