Dijon mustard is becoming rare…because of Canada!

(Dijon, France) “Non-existent” stocks, deliveries that arrive in dribs and drabs and “not very full” grocery store shelves, this is the reality that Luc Vandermaesen is faced with. The leader of Reine de Dijon, France’s third-largest mustard maker, has never experienced such a shortage of mustard seeds in 25 years. And Canada is largely responsible for that.

Myriam Boulianne
special collaboration

“All that remains to be received has already been sold,” laments the general manager of Reine de Dijon, located in Fleurey-sur-Ouche, a village west of Dijon, which sources 80% of seeds from Canadian brown mustard.

The culprit of this shortage? The “heat dome” that hit Western Canada in the summer of 2021. Temperatures that reached 50°C dried out the plants. Several fields in Saskatchewan have not even been harvested for lack of seed.

The region of Burgundy (central-eastern France), where the vast majority of mustard makers are located, is largely dependent on Canada – the world’s largest exporter of mustard seeds – for the manufacture of this condiment.

According to the Canadian Department of Agriculture, mustard seed production is estimated to have fallen by 28% in 2021-2022. The average price reached a record high at $1,700 per tonne, double the price of 2020-2021.

In France, the price of mustard thus increased by 9.26% from April 2021 to April 2022, according to the data analysis company IRI. In Canada, according to the consumer price index, the price of condiments, spices and vinegars jumped 18.7% in one year.

And the more time passes, the more the market dries up. “We have no visibility. We don’t even know what we’re going to be able to do in the next two weeks,” worries the manager of Reine de Dijon, where the overall volume of production has fallen by 25% and export prices have increased by 25 to 40%.

Difficult local production

French farmers, for their part, were unable to compensate for this lack due to the late frost and the insects that ravaged the mustard plants. In 2016, farmers in Burgundy harvested 12,000 tonnes of mustard seeds, up from 4,000 tonnes in 2021.

“Sometimes we have no production at all. However, the sector no longer has the right to insecticides [pourtant] authorized in Canada,” Fabrice Genin, president of the Association of Burgundy Mustard Seed Producers, told AFP.

The Moutarderie Fallot, located in Beaune (south of Dijon), has nevertheless been able to source 100% of Burgundy mustard seeds since 2021. “We are the first to succeed in this challenge. We hope it will be constant and sustainable,” says Marc Désarménien, general manager of the family business.

The latter admits, however, that he had to delay his objective for a few years due to two successive bad harvests in the region. If this were still the case, the leader does not rule out the possibility of having to restock in Canada.

According to Jean-Christophe Bureau, professor of economics at AgroParisTech, Canada specialized in the cultivation of mustard seeds in the 1960s. Larger and more mechanized farms thus allowed a reduction in the cost of production favorable to export. “But when you concentrate the production of a crop in a single region of the world, all it takes is a major climatic shock for the effects of shortage to be felt throughout the planet”, explains the specialist in international trade in the field. agriculture and the environment.

Climatic changes

To cope with the vagaries of the weather, a research center at the AgroSup Dijon engineering school specializing in agronomy and agri-food is currently working to develop more resistant varieties of mustard plants. The objective: to design a seed with a good yield that is suitable for the Burgundy soil and climate in order to secure local production.

Even if the manager of Moutarderie Fallot agrees that it is a “long and expensive” research program and that “nothing has yet succeeded”, he wants the research to continue. “We need to have a sustainable sector in the region so that we can reclaim our product,” believes Marc Désarménien.

However, manufacturers will have to be patient. “Climate change is happening very fast, and science has struggled to keep up. We are seeing the emergence of alternative solutions, but they are not very effective in the long term”, emphasizes Jean-Christophe Bureau.

At Reine de Dijon, Luc Vandermaesen will not be abandoning his supplies from Canada anytime soon. He will rather try to balance them, question “not to put all his eggs in the same basket”. But while waiting for the 2022 summer harvest (July in Burgundy and August in Canada), he remains on the alert, because “a lot of things” can happen: it can hail, rain, have a heat wave . Depend on Canada, of course, but even more on the climate.