A drop in the price of turkey should keep Thanksgiving dinners affordable this year.

The average Thanksgiving dinner — consisting of a seven-pound frozen turkey, 10 pounds of potatoes, a 750-gram pumpkin pie, a pound of carrots, 12 bread rolls, 340 grams of cranberries, 120 grams of stuffing and 284 millilitres of gravy – will cost Canadians $32.48 this year, an increase of just 18 cents compared to last year, according to the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, which collected data from more than 10,000 grocery flyers across the country.

The increase of less than one per cent is significantly lower than Statistics Canada’s

food inflation reading of 3.5 per cent in August. “Thanksgiving dinner is a powerful symbol for Canadian households, and its cost gives us insight into broader

food price dynamics,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab, said in the report. “This year, Canadians are paying almost the same as last year. The bottom line: the holiday meal is stable in cost, but households are seeing a shift in where the money goes.”

— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) October 6, 2025 While most of the items in a typical Thanksgiving dinner remained similar in price to last year, the cost of the turkey and carrots noticeably dropped. The price of a turkey declined to $10.43 from $11.69 and a pound of carrots fell to $0.91 from $1.79.

Charlebois said several factors could be driving the price of turkey down, including grocery marketing strategies and global price easing for some commodities.

Phil Boyd, executive director of the Turkey Farmers of Canada, said there’s been a four per cent decline in turkey prices this year, according to his data, but turkey farmers are far removed from retail pricing.

“Supply is adequate. In fact, the frozen inventories on hand are below where they were a year ago,” he said. “A year ago, we had some interruptions with the highly pathogenic influenza outbreak that created some ripples in the marketplace, for sure.”

Boyd said turkey prices could just as easily be up four per cent next year.

“There’s just a whole variety of factors at play,” he said. Thanksgiving accounts for about a third of the annual turkey sales in Canada, Boyd said, while Christmas and Easter account for another 65 per cent combined.

“When you’ve got 75 per cent of the whole birds moving through two seasons of a year, that’s significant,” he said.

There is some hope turkey sales may expand beyond just the holiday periods. Boyd said immigrants and Canadians 35 and under are considering turkey as more of a year-round food than older Canadians.

“We’re seeing some uptick in the market, we’re seeing some uptick in purchases of turkey meat, so that’s really very good,” he said.

Discounts on turkey might be welcome for Canadian shoppers, but the savings are largely erased when it comes to canned goods because aluminum tariffs are impacting the price of cranberry sauce and gravy.

A can of gravy is up 39 cents this year and the price of canned cranberries is up 50 cents, according to the Dalhousie report.

The Agri-Food Analytics Lab suggests making cranberry sauce and/or gravy from scratch to both save money and potentially be healthier.

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