Track prices for Suraj brown lentils.
Of the dry pulses on Canadian grocery shelves, lentils are one of the few categories where the supply chain is overwhelmingly domestic. Canada is the world's largest producer and exporter of lentils, accounting for roughly 56% of globally traded lentils, and ships to between 80 and 100 countries each year. Within Canada, production is highly concentrated: Saskatchewan grows approximately 95% of the country's lentil crop, with the remainder coming from Alberta and a small amount from Manitoba. The Brown Lens Culinaris classification — the type sold whole as brown lentils in Canadian retail — is grown alongside large green and red lentils across the brown soil and dark brown soil zones of southern and west-central Saskatchewan.
For the Edmonton retail buyer, this geographic concentration is unusual in the broader grocery context: the raw material travels overland from Saskatchewan rather than crossing a border or a port. Calgary and Edmonton sit roughly 600 to 800 kilometres from the Saskatchewan growing belt by truck, which collapses much of the freight, customs, and currency exposure that defines other dry-good categories.
Lentils in Saskatchewan are seeded in late April through early May and harvested between early August and mid-September depending on region and weather. The crop is a single annual pack: processors and packagers draw from one harvest until the next, so any quality or yield issue from a given crop year propagates through retail prices for roughly twelve months.
The 2025-26 Canadian crop was strong. Production rose approximately 38% year over year to 3.4 million tonnes on the back of higher seeded area and improved yields. Large green lentil production reached an estimated 1.0 million tonnes and red lentil production reached approximately 1.8 million tonnes, with the remaining roughly 0.6 million tonnes split across other types including brown lentils. Total Canadian lentil exports for 2025-26 are forecast at 2.1 million tonnes, up from 1.84 million tonnes the previous year, meaning that the larger crop is being absorbed by stronger global demand rather than building unsold domestic stocks. A larger harvest in a category where Canada is the price-setter typically applies modest downward pressure on wholesale farmgate pricing, though retail prices are slower to reflect this because of packaging and inventory cycles.
Canadian lentil processing is consolidated around a small number of large pulse processors based in Saskatchewan. AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. is the most prominent of these. AGT operates cleaning, calibrating, splitting, peeling, and colour-sorting lines for lentils and other pulses across a network of facilities in Western Canada, and packages product under its own retail and foodservice brands as well as for private label customers. AGT has expanded its packaged-foods footprint through acquisitions including the assets and retail brands of CLIC International, adding canning and small-format retail packaging capacity that supplements its bulk export business. The company's reach into India, Türkiye, the U.S., and Australia gives it pricing visibility across the global lentil market, which influences how Canadian-packed retail product is priced into the domestic market.
Other Saskatchewan-based pulse processors and exporters supply the Canadian retail channel through similar cleaning, sorting, and packaging operations. The result is that for most retail brown lentils sold in Edmonton, the path is: Saskatchewan farm to a Saskatchewan processor for cleaning and grading, then to a packager (often the same facility or an adjacent one) for retail bagging.
The Suraj brand specializes in pulses, rice, and spices oriented toward South Asian and broader Canadian retail customers. The whole brown lentils sold under this brand in Canada are labelled as prepared in Canada and are distributed through Loblaw-banner stores including Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills in the Edmonton market. The 1.81 kg format (4 lb) is the standard bulk consumer pack and is positioned at a meaningful discount on a per-100-gram basis compared to the smaller 900-gram and 454-gram retail formats from mainstream private-label and national brands.
The price advantage of the larger Suraj pack reflects a few structural factors. First, larger packs amortize the per-unit cost of bag, label, and case packaging across more grams of product. Second, brands targeting South Asian household consumption tend to compete primarily on value-per-volume rather than on premium positioning, and the category is competitive enough that processors keep margins thin. Third, lentils sold whole and unprocessed beyond cleaning and grading do not carry the cost of splitting, dehulling, or further milling that red split lentils and dal products require, and the simpler processing flow translates into lower delivered cost.
Although the production and processing of brown lentils for Canadian retail is largely domestic, Canadian retail pricing is influenced by global demand because Saskatchewan's crop is sold into a global market. India is by far the most important external factor.
India is Canada's single largest lentil customer and the dominant global consumer of pulses. Indian tariff policy on lentils is volatile and is used as a domestic supply-management tool, with import duties moving between 0% and 30% depending on the size of the domestic Indian harvest and political objectives. After several years of zero or near-zero duty on lentil imports — a policy that supported strong Canadian shipments — India reintroduced a 10% lentil tariff in late 2025 and subsequently moved to a 30% tariff on imported peas. Lentil tariffs as of late 2025 have continued to fluctuate, with a 30% rate cited on Canadian lentil shipments at one stage of the negotiation cycle.
The mechanism by which this affects Edmonton retail prices is indirect but real. When India lowers or eliminates the lentil tariff, Saskatchewan exporters are pulled toward the Indian market and farmgate prices firm up; some of that firmness is passed into Canadian retail pricing on the same year's crop. When India raises the tariff, Canadian product redirects toward other markets such as Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and the resulting softer farmgate environment can ease retail pricing on the margin. The 2025-26 cycle has been characterized by uncertainty in this relationship rather than a clean directional move, which keeps wholesale lentil pricing more reactive than would be expected for a domestic-origin crop.
The U.S. is also a meaningful destination for Canadian lentils, both for direct consumption and for re-export. Canadian lentils crossed the U.S. border tariff-free under CUSMA throughout the 2025 trade dispute period, after Canada and the U.S. resolved most counter-tariff measures effective September 1, 2025 and retained tariffs only on steel, aluminum, and automobiles. U.S. demand for Canadian lentils therefore did not face a direct duty headwind in the relevant period.
Brown lentils are a shelf-stable, ambient-temperature good. They do not require cold chain handling, do not have meaningful spoilage risk in transit, and ship efficiently in pallets of consumer cases. Once packaged in Saskatchewan, retail-ready cases move overland by truck to grocery distribution centres serving Edmonton. The Loblaw distribution network operates a major western Canadian distribution centre in Calgary that services Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills locations across Alberta, including the Edmonton stores selling the Suraj 1.81 kg pack.
Because there is no refrigeration cost, no meaningful tariff exposure on the inbound side, and no port or ocean freight, the cost stack for retail brown lentils is dominated by farmgate pricing, processing and cleaning, packaging materials, and overland trucking. Of these, packaging and trucking have been the inputs under the most recent inflationary pressure: paperboard, polypropylene woven bags, and diesel costs all rose materially through the 2022 to 2025 period and have only partially reverted. The unusually clean domestic supply chain means that lentils have largely been spared the import-cost shocks that hit other categories during the 2025 tariff dispute, but they remain exposed to North American input cost trends.