The pumpkin costs 6 cents. The can costs 19.

The Sunday Teardown · Produce

A 15 ounce can of Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin typically sells for about $3.09. The pumpkin inside it is worth about 6 cents at the price Illinois growers are paid, and the steel can around it costs about 19. The crop comes to about 2 cents of every dollar on the shelf, the container is worth 3 times its contents, and it is still the most straightforward product in the baking aisle.

A teardown usually turns on the distance between what the front of a package claims and what the back concedes, and this can closes that distance entirely. Its ingredient statement is one word long, and what it contains is exactly what the label names. What makes it worth taking apart is everything around that one word: a single variety of squash, a single corner of Illinois, a harvest window of about 6 weeks, and a heat process that home canners are told never to attempt with purée.

The ingredient statement is one word. It reads pumpkin, and nothing follows it. Nothing is added, which is unusual in a category where even plain canned vegetables usually carry salt and often a calcium salt to hold their texture. Canned pumpkin needs neither, and the reason, which comes down to heat and a sealed steel container, is one of the more elegant pieces of engineering in the grocery store.

The pumpkin is a squash, and that is the right call. Libby's packs a proprietary variety it calls Libby's Select, bred from the Dickinson, a tan, oblong fruit of the species Cucurbita moschata, the same species as butternut. It looks nothing like the pumpkin on a front porch, and FDA guidance has long allowed golden-fleshed squash of this kind to be sold as pumpkin. The rule reads like a loophole until you consider the alternative. Carving pumpkins are bred to grow large and hollow, and their flesh is stringy and wet, while a Dickinson is dense and sweet and purées cleanly. A pie made from jack-o'-lanterns would bake up pale and loose, so on this question I side with the formulator without reservation.

Nearly all of it comes from one corner of Illinois. Illinois harvests more than twice as many pumpkin acres as the next 5 states combined, more than 634 million pounds in 2022, and most of it goes to 2 canneries about 30 miles apart: Libby's in Morton, which draws most of its fruit from fields within about 45 miles, and Seneca Foods in Princeville. Regional estimates put the Morton area at roughly 85% of the canned pumpkin produced in the United States. Pumpkin has no national commodity market in the way corn and milk do, so one of the most familiar foods in the country rests on a single seed line, a particular soil and a small number of growing families.

Read across the rows and the aisle sorts itself. The plain can is entirely what its name says. The pie mix is still mostly pumpkin, thinned with water and sweetened with sugar and dextrose, and it names its spices. The creamer carries pumpkin on the front and neither pumpkin nor spice on the back, since its autumn arrives by way of a flavor blend the manufacturer is not required to itemize.

The plain can's nutrition panel agrees with its front. Half a cup has about 40 calories, roughly 3 grams of fiber and no added sugar, along with a large share of a day's vitamin A, because the beta carotene that turns the flesh orange survives canning. It fills you up without doing much for protein, and it remains a vegetable until it becomes pie, at which point it is dessert and should be judged as one.

So the one ingredient costs 6 cents, the can that holds it costs 19, and the finished can sells for about $3.09. A few aisles away, a creamer with neither pumpkin nor spice in it sells for $3.99. I expected the creamer to be the better business. At supermarket prices it isn't, and the reason says more about the can than about the creamer.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I follow a Dickinson squash from a field outside Morton through the cannery: the 6 week pack that has to supply a full year, the finisher that separates purée from skin and seed, and the retort that makes a preservative unnecessary, a step federal rules treat as seriously as any in food manufacturing. Then the cost sheet for the plain can, the pie mix and the pumpkin spice creamer, and why the can carries a bigger multiple than the engineered product. I also price the pie both ways with every ingredient counted, put whole squash against the pre-cut kind and a roasted pie pumpkin against the can, and close with what I buy.