National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, you say?

Apparently, yes. April 2 is National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Let’s celebrate with some tasty data.

We don’t grow many peanuts here in Canada, but we do enjoy eating them. Our food availability release, which tracks the amount of food physically present in a country for consumption, reported that a record high 3.5 kilograms of peanuts per person was available for consumption in Canada in 2020.

What Canadian farmers do grow a lot of is fresh fruit, which can be made into jelly.

Canada is the second-largest blueberry producer in the world, following the United States. In 2021, Canadian farmers harvested 142 779 metric tonnes of blueberries, down 2.6% from 2020 and 18.9% lower from 2019, when a record high of 176 155 metric tonnes were produced.

Strawberry is reputed to be the most popular fruit jelly; Canadians farmers grew 23 490 metric tonnes of strawberries in 2021, down 0.5% from 2020 and 11.2% lower from 2019.

The year 2021 was the most difficult for raspberry farmers on record. Production fell 25.8% from a year earlier to 5 253 metric tonnes, by far the lowest level since the current data series began and 83.0% less than when we first counted in 2002.

Saskatoon berry production was down 1.0% from the record high set in 2020 to 668 metric tonnes in 2021. This was over double the amount produced in 2011 (322 metric tonnes), when we first started collecting data on this Western Canadian fruit, which is a traditional food of Indigenous people in Canada.

Like many other food products across Canada, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is going to cost you more today than it would have last year or just prior to the pandemic.

Canadians paid 3.7% more for bread, rolls and buns in February 2022 compared with the same month a year earlier and 5.7% more than in February 2020, just prior to the pandemic.

The price of nut butter—which includes peanut butter—rose 5.6% year over year, and Canadians were paying 8.7% more than prior to the pandemic.

The next time that you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you may want to go easy on the jelly. Prices for jams, jellies and preserves rose 10.9% year over year in February and were 11.0% higher than before the pandemic.

To learn more about food prices, check out the monthly Consumer Price Index.