Hazelnut Supply & Demand

Hazelnut Supply & Demand

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Here with your Market Line Commodity Report, I’m Tim Hammerich.

Markets were closed yesterday in observance of the Memorial Day Holiday. I thought I’d take this chance to highlight a specialty commodity grown in the Pacific Northwest, hazelnuts.

The Willamette Valley of Oregon is home to the vast majority of the U.S. hazelnut industry, and acreage has really boomed in the past decade.

Darrin Cline is the Communications Director for the Oregon Hazelnut Industry Office. He says despite the rise in acreage, they remain optimistic about demand.

Cline… “We went from about 30,000 acres in 2010 to about 85,000 acres currently planted right now in 2020. Not all 87,000 of those are 85,000 to 87,000 will be producing, but they're steadily heading that way. So we are pretty fortunate that globally, there is an interest in hazelnuts. We've seen a lot of products like Nutella that people are getting a great deal of interest in. And other hazelnut products: hazelnut chocolates. Hazelnuts are proven to be a great alternative for people with peanut allergies. Hazelnut spread, and hazelnut products have been able to fill that niche really well.”

The recent resurgence of hazelnut acreage is a result of research done at Oregon State University that produced a variety resistant to blight that had almost wiped out the industry.

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