Hemp Seed | Market Size, Share & Growth Report 2025-2034

North America is where food-grade hemp seed production and branded demand are concentrated. Canadian hemp grain plantings reached 12,859 hectares in 2025, up 53 percent from roughly 8,400 hectares in 2024, with Alberta at 6,999 hectares, Saskatchewan at 4,225 and Manitoba at 2,917, and grain accounted for more than 80 percent of all reported Canadian hemp fields. The three GRAS clearances the Food and Drug Administration completed in December 2018 opened the United States market to dehulled seed, protein powder and oil. All four of the four largest branded hemp seed food businesses identified are North American. No regional market size, revenue or growth figure was identified from any statistical agency, so the ranking rests on that documented production and commercial concentration.

Europe has the longest continuous commercial hemp history of any region, and HempFlax Group B.V. of the Netherlands describes itself as Europe's oldest hemp company. European Union cultivation operates under a tetrahydrocannabinol ceiling for approved varieties, which sets a different compliance test from the one North American growers meet. France is the largest European producer and supplies much of the certified seed planted elsewhere on the continent. European hemp acreage has historically been directed towards fibre and seed together rather than towards cannabidiol, which left the food seed supply chain less disrupted when cannabidiol demand fell away.

China cultivates more than 60,000 hectares of industrial hemp, concentrated in Yunnan, Heilongjiang, Shanxi and Anhui, which is the largest planted area of any country. Most of that area serves fibre and cannabidiol extraction rather than food-grade seed, and Yunnan in particular has become the largest producing region for cannabidiol. Chinese processors including Liaoning Qiaopai Biotech supply hemp seed ingredients into export markets. Australia legalised low-tetrahydrocannabinol hemp seed as a food in 2017, which created a domestic market later than North America's but under a comparable safety framework.

Latin American hemp cultivation is governed by cannabis frameworks written for medical production rather than for food crops, which has slowed the separation of hemp seed from the regulatory treatment of the plant as a controlled substance. Uruguay, Colombia and Paraguay have licensed cultivation, with output directed mainly at cannabidiol and medical cannabis rather than at hemp hearts, oil or protein. No producer in the region has been identified operating a food-grade dehulling or cold-pressing plant at a scale comparable to Canadian facilities, and no regional market figure for hemp seed foods is published.

Hemp cultivation across the region is constrained by cannabis control law rather than by agronomy, and several countries prohibit the crop irrespective of tetrahydrocannabinol content. South Africa and Lesotho have issued hemp cultivation licences, and Morocco legalised regulated cultivation in the northern Rif provinces, but the licensed activity is directed at fibre and cannabidiol rather than at food seed. No dehulling or cold-pressing capacity serving the food trade has been identified in the region, and no government agency publishes hemp seed consumption or revenue data.