World Production of Echinacea
Answered by: Richters Staff
Question from: Maria Devlin
Posted: Before April 1998

Do you have information on the world production of Echinacea?

Do you have information production of Echinacea in Australia?

We are not aware of anyone collecting this information. Whole Foods, a trade magazine for the health-food industry, reports that sales of echinacea products in the United States are around US$80 million annually. Echinacea represents 9.9% of all herb product sales in the United States. Health food stores represent about 40% of the total U.S. medicinal herb industry (HerbalGram, 1996) so we may guess that total echinacea product sales are in the area of US$200 million in the U.S. Canada’s market is about 10% of the U.S. market so total North American echinacea sales might be US$220 million.

North America represents 12% of the total world herbal medicine market of US$12.4 billion (HerbalGram, 1994). Echinacea is probably similarly popular in Europe but not so popular in the rest of the world where it is not as well known. If we say for argument’s sake that there are no significant sales outside Europe and North America, the world market for echinacea is somewhere around $1 billion.

These figures are at the retail level for manufactured herbal products. We estimate that the farm-gate value of the herbs, the portion farmers get for the raw bulk herbs used in finished herbal products, is only about 2-3% of the retail value. The farm-gate value of the echinacea production is therefore about US$20 to US$30 million worldwide.

We must stress that these are very rough estimates. They could easily be off by more than 100%. As more information becomes available we will have a better idea of the size of the market.

As for the Australian market we have no idea of its share of the world market. Based on population, we might make a first stab at guessing at about half the Canadian market, or US$10 million at the retail level. The farm-gate value would be US$200,000 to US$300,000.

Do you have information on the buyers of echinacea?

This depends very much on the size of the production. We have previously commented on the marketing of bulk echinacea in our answer to an earlier question on echinacea, Please check the FAQ section.

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