Americans CRANnot imagine
Thanksgiving without their favorite cranberry side dishes!
Ocean Spray’s Cranberry by the Numbers:
- 400 million pounds of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. Twenty percent of that is during the week of Thanksgiving. That’s 80 million pounds!
- 5,062,500 gallons of jellied cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season.
- 70 million is the number of cans of cranberry sauce Ocean Spray produces a year.
- The average number of cranberries used per can of sauce is 200.
- If you lay out all the cans of sauce consumed in a year from end to end, it would stretch 3,385 miles. That's the distance from New York to Frankfurt, Germany or the length of 67,500 football fields.
- The cranberry was considered a seasonal fruit until a lawyer-turned-grower named Marcus Urann realized that the berries he harvested exceeded demand. Hating to see good fruit go to waste, he perfected a tasty sauce that he canned and called Ocean Spray in 1912.
- A recipe for cranberry sauce appeared in The Pilgrim Cookbook of 1663
First-Time Thanksgiving Hosts and Cranberries:
- 96% of first-time hosts plan to incorporate cranberries in some shape or form this Thanksgiving (in sides, drinks, desserts and more).
- 61% of those first-time hosts plan on serving a traditional sauce (canned or home-made).
- Other popular uses include: 31% of first-time hosts serving cranberries as a side dish, 27% in a pie or dessert and 22% will be serving cranberry cocktails or mocktails.
- 73% of first-time hosts will serve a traditional Thanksgiving meal with ALL the fixings: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and of course … the cranberry sauce!
American Cranberry Sauce Habits:
- 76 percent of Americans serve store-bought cranberry sauce at their Thanksgiving meals versus homemade.
- 73 percent of Americans prefer their cranberry sauce jellied in the shape of can!
- 68 percent of Americans say they love the taste of cranberry sauce. Another 15 percent just love the way it jiggles!
- Six in ten Americans say cranberry sauce has and always will be on their Thanksgiving table. More than a third (39 percent) go as far as saying they “can’t live without it!”
- 54 percent of Americans serve their sauce sliced along the ridges.
First-Time Thanksgiving Hosts and Cranberries are sourced from a survey conducted by KRC Research among a national sample of 2,343 adults, age 18 years and older who eat Thanksgiving dinner. The survey was conducted online in September 2017.
American Cranberry Sauce Habits are sourced from a survey conducted by KRC Research among a national sample of 1,010 adults, age 18 years and older who eat Thanksgiving dinner. The survey was conducted online from June 12 to June 16, 2015.
