Compare prices for No Name jam across flavours.
Jam is a manufactured pantry product whose price reflects three commodity inputs (fruit, sugar, and pectin), one packaging input (glass), and a regulated trade policy environment that has held in place for three decades. The two No Name 1L SKUs tracked here — strawberry and raspberry, both labelled "with pectin" — are private-label products of Loblaw Companies Limited. They are sold against branded competition from Smucker's, E.D. Smith (a Canadian heritage brand owned by TreeHouse Foods), Bonne Maman, and the smaller Crofter's organic line. The cost stack behind a No Name jar is structurally similar across both flavours, with the meaningful variable being industrial-grade frozen berry inputs.
Canadian Food Inspection Agency Standards of Identity define jam as a product containing not less than 45 percent of the named fruit, with the remainder principally sugar plus a regulated set of permitted additives including pectin and food acids. The 45 percent floor is the reason a jar of jam is a fruit-cost-driven product rather than a sugar product, and the reason the strawberry and raspberry variants track different price curves despite sharing brand, format, and co-pack origin.
Industrial-grade frozen berries are a separate commercial product from retail-grade IQF berries. Processors purchase Grade B and Grade C fruit — pieces, broken berries, and slices that do not meet retail clamshell or whole-IQF specifications — at a meaningful discount. The Canadian retail frozen fruit market is dominated by Nature's Touch, which holds approximately 70 to 75 percent of consumer retail frozen fruit share and operates processing facilities in Montreal and Abbotsford, British Columbia. The same processors and the same primary growing regions feed industrial buyers, but at lower cuts and tiers.
For strawberries, the U.S. supplies 74 percent of Canadian imports by value and Mexico supplies the remaining 26 percent, with California the dominant U.S. growing region and Egypt emerging as a meaningful alternative source for Canadian buyers seeking diversification. Wholesale strawberry prices in Canada have trended upward from approximately USD $7.13/kg in 2022 to $8.58/kg in 2025, with 2026 tracking at roughly $10.74/kg. Industrial-grade fruit moves with this curve at a discount, but the discount band has been narrowing as buyers across the food processing sector — bakery, dairy, and confection — compete for the same downgraded fruit.
For raspberries, the supply picture is more concentrated. North America accounts for roughly 45 percent of global production, with Mexico the second-largest supplier globally and California the principal U.S. region. Driscoll's, the dominant North American berry brand, supplies a network of independent growers and is expanding production in British Columbia and eastern Canada. Raspberries are more fragile than strawberries and a higher fraction of the harvest moves directly into frozen and processed channels rather than fresh — which keeps industrial raspberry inputs comparatively expensive on a per-kilogram basis. The price gap between strawberry and raspberry jam at retail is largely a reflection of this raw-material differential.
Canadian domestic strawberry and raspberry production is short-window: roughly mid-July through early August for strawberries in Alberta and Quebec, and a slightly longer summer-through-early-fall window for raspberries in British Columbia and Ontario. Domestic supply is too seasonal and too small to underpin year-round industrial demand, so jam co-packers rely on frozen reserves drawn down throughout the year.
The second-largest ingredient in a jar of jam is refined sugar, and the Canadian refined sugar market is one of the most concentrated commodity markets in the country. Lantic Inc. — the operating company of Rogers Sugar Ltd. — and Redpath Sugar (owned by ASR Group) together supply substantially all of Canada's refined sugar for industrial use. Lantic operates a cane refinery in Montreal originally built in 1888, a cane refinery in Vancouver established in 1890, a distribution plant in Toronto, and Canada's only sugar beet factory at Taber, Alberta, which is supplied by approximately 200 Southern Alberta sugar beet farm families. Redpath operates a single cane refinery on the Toronto waterfront.
Approximately 90 percent of Canada's refined sugar is produced from raw cane sugar imported from tropical producing regions, principally Brazil, Australia, and Central America, and refined domestically. The remaining share is sugar beet refined at Taber. Industrial buyers — including jam co-packers — purchase sugar in bulk under contract with one of the two refiners, with pricing benchmarked to the New York No. 11 raw cane sugar futures plus a refining margin and freight.
Unlike dairy, sugar is not subject to supply management. Canada is one of the few major economies without a domestic sugar program — there is no farmgate price-setting mechanism, no quota system, and no consumer price floor. Domestic refined sugar pricing therefore reflects the world raw cane market, refining margin, and the policy environment described below, rather than an administrative pricing formula.
In May 2025, Lantic announced a new five-year supply agreement with the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers covering the Taber facility, securing the only domestic beet sugar volume through the end of the decade. This is meaningful for Western Canadian industrial buyers because Taber-refined beet sugar moves shorter distances than Montreal- or Vancouver-refined cane sugar and carries a smaller embedded freight cost in the Prairie market.
Pectin is the gelling agent that turns sweetened fruit into jam. Commercial pectin is extracted primarily from citrus peel — a byproduct of orange and lemon juice production — with a smaller fraction extracted from apple pomace. Canada does not produce pectin at commercial scale. Global supply is concentrated among CP Kelco (now part of Mitsubishi Chemical Group), Cargill, IFF, and Andre Pectin of China, with Brazilian and Mexican processors supplying much of the underlying citrus-peel feedstock as a residual stream from the orange juice industry.
Pectin pricing has been volatile through the 2020s for two structural reasons. First, citrus greening disease (HLB) has reduced Florida and Brazilian orange production, tightening the peel-feedstock supply for pectin extractors. Second, pectin demand from the broader food and pharmaceutical industries has grown faster than supply expansion, with applications in dairy, bakery, and gummy confections drawing volume away from the traditional jam channel. For a No Name jar, pectin is a small share of total ingredient cost but a meaningful share of cost volatility.
No Name is the discount private-label brand of Loblaw Companies Limited, launched in 1978 and now spanning more than 2,500 SKUs across Loblaw's banners (Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws, Independent, and No Frills in Edmonton). Private-label jam is co-packed by contract manufacturers rather than produced in-house. Canadian co-packing capacity for jam and jelly is concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, with operators including TreeHouse Foods (E.D. Smith) at its Winona, Ontario facility, and a number of smaller Quebec-based fruit processors that supply private-label volume to multiple national grocers.
Loblaw's scale gives it significant leverage in private-label co-pack negotiations. The reference price for the negotiation is the input commodity cost (industrial frozen fruit plus sugar plus pectin plus glass) plus a co-packing fee — typically a low single-digit margin per unit — plus inbound freight to Loblaw's distribution centres. National brands like Smucker's carry roughly 25 to 35 percent advertising and brand-development cost embedded in their unit price; the No Name SKU does not carry this overhead, which is the structural reason for the gap between the No Name and Smucker's price points on adjacent shelf positions.
Both 1L SKUs use a metal twist-off lid (typically tin-plated steel) on a glass jar. The "with pectin" descriptor on No Name jam signals that added pectin has been used to achieve a firmer set, distinct from "no added pectin" or "extra fruit" formulations that rely on the natural pectin in the fruit and longer cooking times. Added-pectin formulations let the co-packer use less fruit per jar within the 45 percent CFIA Standard of Identity floor, run shorter cook cycles, and produce a more uniform set across batches — all factors that lower per-unit production cost.
The jar itself is a non-trivial cost. The North American food-grade glass container market is concentrated among O-I Glass and Ardagh Glass Packaging, with smaller volumes from Canadian Glass Manufacturers and imported jars from Europe and Asia. Glass is heavy, expensive to ship long distances, and energy-intensive to manufacture — natural gas accounts for a large share of the operating cost of a glass furnace, which makes glass-jar pricing sensitive to North American gas prices.
Industrial jam buyers source jars on long contract from one of the major manufacturers, typically with delivery to the co-packer's plant rather than to Loblaw directly. Glass-jar costs have trended upward through 2024 and 2025 in line with energy and freight cost inflation, and the glass share of the landed jar cost is now meaningfully higher than it was in the late 2010s.
Jam is shelf-stable and not temperature-controlled, which keeps distribution cost lower than it is for dairy, frozen, or fresh produce categories. Loblaw moves western Canadian No Name volume through its Real Canadian Superstore distribution network, with the Calgary distribution centre serving as the primary Alberta hub. From an Ontario or Quebec co-packer, jam moves by ambient truck or rail across the Ontario-to-Prairie corridor — the same corridor used for a wide range of packaged grocery goods.
Edmonton is approximately 300 km north of the Calgary distribution cluster, a single-day truck haul. The freight share of the Edmonton retail price for jam is therefore smaller than for fresh or frozen products, but the underlying cross-country movement from Ontario or Quebec co-pack plants to Calgary remains a material line item, and one that has trended upward with diesel costs and the persistent shortage of long-haul drivers in Canada.
The most consequential and least visible piece of Canadian trade policy in the jam cost stack is the anti-dumping and countervailing duty order on refined sugar. The original Canadian International Trade Tribunal finding was issued in 1995 and covered refined sugar from the United States, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (dumping), and from the European Union (subsidizing). The order has been continued through successive sunset reviews — most recently by CITT order issued August 6, 2021, following Expiry Review No. RR-2020-002 — and remains in force.
The practical effect of the order is that imported refined sugar from the named jurisdictions enters Canada subject to anti-dumping and countervailing duties that, in most cases, are large enough to make imports commercially uncompetitive against domestic refined cane and beet sugar from Lantic and Redpath. The order has therefore protected the Canadian refining duopoly for thirty years, and the Canadian industrial sugar price has consistently traded above the U.S. industrial price, sometimes meaningfully so. Canadian food processors — including jam co-packers — operate on this elevated cost base and pass it through to retail.
A separate piece of trade policy that interacts with this picture is the U.S. sugar program, which uses tariff-rate quotas and price supports to keep the U.S. domestic sugar price above the world price. Canada's situation is therefore not a story of domestic protectionism standing against an open international market — it is a story of two protectionist regimes flanking each side of the border, both of which contribute to a North American refined sugar price that is structurally above the world market.
The order is up for its next sunset review on the standard five-year cycle. Each review proceeds through a CBSA expiry review investigation and a CITT inquiry into whether expiry of the order would likely result in injury to the Canadian industry. The pattern across previous reviews has been continuation of the order, and there is no public indication that the upcoming review will deviate from that pattern. For a Canadian jam co-packer, the realistic planning assumption is that the elevated industrial sugar cost will persist through the late 2020s.
Canada imposed 25 percent counter-tariffs on approximately CAD $30 billion in U.S. goods effective March 4, 2025, in response to U.S. tariff actions earlier in the year. Effective September 1, 2025, Canada removed most of those counter-tariffs in recognition of the U.S. allowing most Canadian goods tariff-free entry under CUSMA, retaining counter-tariffs only on steel, aluminum, and automobiles. Industrial frozen fruit, refined sugar where imported under permit, and most packaged-goods inputs returned to tariff-free status under CUSMA compliance.
The retained counter-tariffs on steel and aluminum do touch the jam cost stack indirectly through the metal twist-off lid on each jar, but the lid is a small fraction of total packaging cost and the specific effect on a 1L jam jar is correspondingly small. The larger effect of the 2025 trade dispute on the jam category was the period of uncertainty itself, which tightened co-pack contract terms and made buyers more cautious about exposing themselves to single-origin U.S. ingredient sourcing.
Three forces frame the near-term direction of retail jam prices in Edmonton. First, the industrial frozen fruit cost — particularly for strawberries and raspberries — is on a clear upward trajectory through 2026 as wholesale berry prices continue to rise across both retail and processing channels. This is the dominant variable for the No Name SKU and will push the strawberry and raspberry shelf prices upward at differentiated rates given the underlying raw-material gap. Second, the Canadian industrial sugar cost is structurally elevated by the long-standing CITT order on refined sugar, and the 2026 sunset review is unlikely to alter that picture. Third, glass jar costs continue to drift upward with North American natural gas prices and freight, while pectin pricing remains exposed to citrus-peel feedstock volatility.
The combined effect is a category that is unlikely to see meaningful retail price relief through 2026 and 2027. The more relevant short-term variable for Edmonton consumers comparing prices week to week is Loblaw's promotional cadence on the No Name SKU, since the underlying input costs move slowly relative to flyer cycles.