Track prices for Suraj chickpeas.
Whole chickpeas sold at Canadian retail are an overwhelmingly domestic product. Canada is among the world's top five chickpea producers and a significant exporter, and within Canada the crop is concentrated almost entirely in Saskatchewan, which accounts for roughly 85 to 95 percent of national output. Chickpeas are best adapted to the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones of southern and west-central Saskatchewan, where the relatively dry climate suits the crop's deep taproot and where the long, warm growing days through July and August support pod fill. Alberta produces a small share of the national crop, primarily in the southeast.
For an Edmonton retail buyer, this geographic concentration means the raw material moves overland from Saskatchewan along the same prairie rail and highway corridors used for lentils and peas. The supply chain does not cross a border or a port, which collapses much of the freight, customs, and currency exposure that defines pulses sourced from Mexico, India, or the Middle East.
Chickpeas in Saskatchewan are seeded in late April through mid-May, with planting timed to soil temperatures above 5 to 7 degrees Celsius. The crop flowers through July and matures into September, and harvest typically runs from late August through mid-September depending on region and weather. Chickpeas are slower-maturing than lentils, which puts them at greater risk of an early frost in a cool autumn but allows them to take advantage of late-season heat in a warm one.
Because chickpeas are harvested once a year and drawn down over the following twelve months, processor and retail pricing is highly sensitive to acreage announcements in the spring, mid-summer crop condition reports, and the early harvest read in late August. The 2025-26 Canadian crop was strong. Production is estimated at approximately 315,000 to 331,000 tonnes, an increase of roughly 10 to 15 percent year over year, and Saskatchewan yields came in near a record at approximately 32.8 bushels per acre against a five-year average more than 10 bushels lower. This was achieved even as roughly 54 percent of Saskatchewan was reported under drought conditions through the late growing season, reflecting the fact that chickpea's deep taproot makes it relatively drought-tolerant compared with most other prairie pulses. Saskatchewan Pulse Growers — Chickpea Market Opportunities Government of Saskatchewan — Chickpea Adaptation and Varieties
A larger crop in a category where Canada is a significant share of global trade applies modest downward pressure on wholesale farmgate pricing. Larger calibre kabuli prices have remained firm because of segmented end-use demand, while medium and small calibre prices have come under more pressure as the bigger crop works through the channel.
Two main types of chickpeas are grown commercially in Canada. Kabuli chickpeas are the larger, lighter-coloured seed familiar to Canadian consumers — the format used whole in salads, hummus, and curries, and the format that dominates retail dried and canned chickpea SKUs. Desi chickpeas are smaller, darker, and angular, and are predominantly milled into besan (chickpea flour) or split into chana dal for South Asian cooking. The two types are agronomically similar but trade in different end markets at different prices.
Canadian production has historically tilted heavily toward kabuli, which is the higher-value variety for the export markets Canada serves and the dominant variety on retail shelves. Desi production is smaller and oriented toward processing and South Asian export channels. The 907-gram retail pack covered here is a kabuli format consistent with whole-cooking use and with the South Asian retail positioning of the Suraj brand.
Canadian chickpea processing is consolidated around a small number of large pulse processors based in Saskatchewan, who also handle the lentil, pea, and bean crops. AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. is the most prominent of these. AGT operates cleaning, calibrating, sorting, and packaging lines for chickpeas 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 and branded customers. The company exports to over one hundred countries, which gives it pricing visibility across the global chickpea market and influences how Canadian-packed retail product is priced into the domestic channel. AGT Food and Ingredients — Wikipedia
The Suraj brand specializes in pulses, rice, and spices oriented toward South Asian and broader Canadian retail customers. The whole chickpeas sold under this brand in Canada are labelled as prepared in Canada and are distributed through Loblaw-banner stores including Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws, and No Frills in the Edmonton market. Loblaws — Suraj brand listings The 907-gram (two pound) format is the standard mid-size consumer pack for kabuli chickpeas and sits at a meaningful per-100-gram discount against smaller 540-gram and 454-gram retail formats.
The price advantage of the Suraj line reflects a few structural factors. Larger and South Asian-oriented packs amortize per-unit packaging cost across more grams of product, brands targeting South Asian household consumption tend to compete on value-per-volume rather than on premium positioning, and whole chickpeas sold without splitting or dehulling do not carry the cost of additional processing required for chana dal or besan.
India is the central variable in the global chickpea market. It is simultaneously the world's largest producer, the world's largest consumer, and an inconsistent net importer whose policy on tariffs has repeatedly reshaped global pulse trade. Indian gram (chana, primarily desi) production for the 2024-25 rabi (winter) crop was estimated at approximately 11.5 million tonnes. Aggregate Indian pulse imports rose from 4.7 million tonnes in 2023-24 to a record 7.2 million tonnes in 2024-25 as domestic shortages drove India to lean on the international market.
The pricing-relevant policy moves are recent and consequential. India had historically maintained import duties on chickpeas in the range of 50 to 66 percent to protect domestic farmers, prices that were prohibitive enough to keep Canadian and Australian volumes out of the Indian market for most of the post-2017 period. In May 2024, India suspended that duty and allowed duty-free chickpea imports in response to a poor domestic crop, opening the Indian market to Canadian and Australian supply for the first time in years. Effective April 1, 2025, India reintroduced a 10 percent ad valorem import duty on desi chickpeas, with a parallel 10 percent duty on lentils introduced March 7, 2025. Mundus Agri — Chickpeas: India reintroduces import duties Pulse Pod — Tariffs on pulses
Most market commentary considers a 10 percent duty too modest to materially close the Indian market, but the tariff signal still creates uncertainty about future policy direction and dampens the marginal demand boost that the duty-free year had provided. For Canadian growers and processors, India is therefore an important but inherently volatile demand source: when Indian production is weak and tariffs are low, the Indian market can absorb meaningful Canadian volume and support farmgate prices; when Indian production rebounds or tariffs rise, that demand evaporates quickly and channel inventories accumulate.
For an Edmonton retail buyer, the practical effect is that wholesale Canadian chickpea prices carry a meaningful India-linked premium or discount on top of the underlying prairie supply position. The retail-pack market is more insulated than the bulk export market because retail volumes are committed to packagers under longer supply arrangements, but the price signal still flows through with a lag.
Beyond India, Canada's chickpea exports are diversified across a small number of structural buyers. The United States is the largest single buyer of Canadian chickpeas, taking approximately one-quarter of exports in recent years, with Pakistan, Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, and the European Union making up most of the balance. Recent Kabuli export volumes have softened year over year, with Canadian Kabuli exports of approximately 91,000 tonnes against approximately 117,000 tonnes the prior year, reflecting both production levels in competing exporters such as Mexico and Argentina and the global price recalibration following India's policy shifts. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service — Spotlight: Global Chickpea Exports Rise The Western Producer — Wealth of chickpeas will affect export market
Diversification across these markets gives Canadian processors flexibility, but no single non-India market is large enough to absorb the volumes that India can take when its market is open, which is why Indian policy continues to set the tone for global pricing.
Whole dried chickpeas are a shelf-stable, low-moisture, high-density commodity. They tolerate ambient warehousing and ship efficiently per cubic metre, which removes the cold chain cost layer that defines frozen and dairy categories. From Saskatchewan processing and packaging facilities, retail-packed Suraj chickpeas move by truck to Loblaw distribution centres serving Western Canada, with the Calgary distribution centre as the primary Alberta hub, and from there to individual store backrooms in the Edmonton market.
Freight is a real but secondary cost line. The roughly 600 to 800 kilometres from the Saskatchewan growing belt and processing footprint to Edmonton represents a half-day to full-day truck movement, which is a fraction of the freight position carried by rice, beans imported from Latin America, or canned produce sourced from international ingredient streams. Diesel cost, driver availability, and seasonal trucking capacity around the harvest period are the meaningful variables, but none of these dominate the cost stack the way the underlying farmgate price does.
Three forces shape the trajectory of retail whole chickpea pricing in Edmonton. First, the strong 2025-26 Canadian crop is putting modest downward pressure on wholesale prices for medium and small kabuli calibres, while the largest calibres remain firm on segmented end-use demand. Second, India's 10 percent duty reintroduced in April 2025 dampens the marginal demand support that Indian buying had provided through the duty-free year, but does not close the Indian market. Third, the broader prairie pulse acreage rotation between chickpeas, lentils, and peas continues to respond to relative price signals, meaning the 2026-27 crop year acreage decision in March will set the stage for how much of the current price softness persists.
Compared with split lentils and other heavily processed pulses, whole chickpeas carry a relatively transparent cost stack: farmgate price, cleaning and grading, retail packaging, and inland freight. There is no significant import tariff layer for the dominant domestic supply path, and the retail margin structure on bulk South Asian-oriented pulse SKUs is thin enough that wholesale price moves typically pass through to the shelf within one to two retail price cycles.