How Many Pumpkins Does Illinois Grow? Enough For 8 Billion Lattes

I've got to throw a big thank you to IllinoisPolicy.org for the "8 billion pumpkin spice lattes" number, because although I knew we were one of the world's top pumpkin growing powerhouses, I didn't know we grew that many of them.

And that is billion with a B.

That’s almost one Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) for every person on the planet, with enough left over to keep the Midwest caffeinated well into winter. You could also make around 970 million loaves of pumpkin bread or almost half a billion pumpkin pies from Illinois' yearly harvest.

Another way of putting that number into perspective would be to consider that Illinois farmers harvest roughly 500 million pounds of pumpkins each year, which is enough to fill about 375 Olympic-sized swimming pools with PSLs.

If you lined up every Illinois-grown pumpkin from end-to-end, they’d stretch from Chicago to Los Angeles and back. Twice.

Keep in mind that the Illinois pumpkins we're talking about don't look like this:

They look like this:

Illinois Could Be Called The Pumpkin Supplier To The World

Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state, and the vast majority are processed in or around Morton, home to a Libby’s plant, which handles roughly 85% of the world’s canned pumpkin. That means when you open a can of purée or sip a pumpkin spice latte made with it, there’s a very good chance the pumpkin inside came from Illinois soil.

Countries like China and India grow enormous quantities of pumpkins for their own markets, so Illinois isn’t the world’s top supplier of all pumpkins. But when it comes to the creamy, pie-ready purée that defines autumn in America, Illinois really does feed the world.

The pumpkins go from this:

To this:

To this:

Illinois Is Number One In Pumpkin Production, But Who Follows Behind Us?

Here are the top ten pumpkin-producing states in the US, along with the total number of pounds produced last year in 2024 (hat tip to IllinoisPolicy.org):

1. Illinois: 485,100,000
2. Indiana: 159,750,000
3. Pennsylvania: 108,800,000
4. California: 105,750,000
5. Michigan: 104,550,000
6. Ohio: 67,500,000
7. Washington: 57,000,000
8. Virginia: 54,050,000
9. Wisconsin: 49,600,000
10. New York: 46,000,000