This is the economic backdrop to the price work, and it is kept separate from Market Data. Production and prices live in different time blocks, because they describe different moments: the latest reported production year is 2025, while the public price observation is 9 November 2026. They are never blended into one number.
Every figure on this page carries its source, its period and a status. Nothing is rescaled to look tidy, and where the public record disagrees with itself, the disagreement is shown rather than smoothed away.
World farmed caviar output for 2025 is about 808 t industry estimate from the Caviar Industry Conference (CIC). That is an industry estimate, not an official statistic, and species resolution across it is weak: only about 36% of the 2025 total is resolved to a species, and that resolved part comes from a single company report.
Summing the individual country figures that circulate (mixed vintages) gives 819.9 t, which is 11.5 t, about 1.4%, more than the CIC world total, even though the years behind them differ. Cavport shows that gap rather than rescaling the countries to match the headline.
Producer first-sale prices, not retail prices, anchor any honest production value. Two reference points exist in the public record for 2025. Kaluga Queen's volume-weighted average selling price was €320.9/kg official (291.5 t for €93.5m, from its HKEX filing, converted at the ECB rate), and China's export unit value was €292.5/kg official (RMB 2,185/kg at 7.4689). These are first-sale and export levels, far below retail, and they are the only producer-side anchors currently available. A full world production value waits on European first-sale cells, which do not yet exist, so Cavport treats any single-cell estimate as internal only (see the Measures).
The mixed-roe trap. Official trade and production categories often fold trout and other roe into "caviar". Germany's Destatis reports 97,449 kg of "Rogen/Kaviar" for 2024, which includes trout roe. A mixed-egg figure can never feed a sturgeon-caviar aggregate here; the schema forbids it.
The HS-code trap. HS 1604.31 (caviar) and 1604.32 (caviar substitutes) are never combined, and the pre-2012 legacy code 1604.30, which merged both, is flagged and kept out of caviar-only series.
The re-export trap. Switzerland, EU hubs and the UAE move a great deal of caviar they do not produce. Re-exports are tracked through origin and a re-export flag, so a transit hub is never counted as a producer. Exporter and importer reports are stored side by side and their gap is shown as a reporting asymmetry, not averaged away.
Where production and both trade sides exist for the same country and year, apparent consumption is production plus imports minus exports, with re-exports excluded from both sides. It is shown only with explicit caveats about stock changes, reporting asymmetry and classification, and a trade unit value derived from customs data is labelled as such and never called a market price.
This is real, and it is about sellers, not producers. The table below is the seller market of every public retail observation in the snapshot: the country the selling retailer operates in. It is not production origin, and it is never read as one.
| Seller market | Observations | Sellers | Sturgeon listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1038 | 14 | 679 |
| Germany | 277 | 10 | 194 |
| France | 236 | 5 | 186 |
| United Arab Emirates | 113 | 3 | 95 |
| Italy | 97 | 3 | 74 |
| United Kingdom | 81 | 4 | 56 |
| Hong Kong | 65 | 3 | 51 |
| Japan | 62 | 2 | 9 |
| Austria | 45 | 1 | 39 |
| Canada | 40 | 1 | 29 |
| Australia | 39 | 3 | 37 |
| Spain | 2 | 1 | 2 |
Concentration in the observations themselves is disclosed, not smoothed: the single largest seller market is about 49% of usable observations, so a raw listing-weighted figure leans toward that market. This is why the Master Board defaults to seller-balanced medians.
The production charts the full briefing calls for, world output by year, output by country, output by species, the aquaculture pipeline and the production-against-price scatter, are drawn only from a sourced production ledger. That ledger is not yet ingested, so the panels below are deliberately empty frames rather than lines drawn from memory. One real figure anchors them: the 2025 world estimate.
2025 is the only reported year held. Earlier years and CIC forecasts appear as they are ingested, forecasts as hollow bars, never as Cavport estimates.
Ranked bars coloured by confidence tier, each labelled with tonnes, source year and tier. Countries resting on assumption are not shown and figures are never summed to a world total. awaiting ledger
In 2025 only about 36% is species-resolved, from one company report; the remaining 64% stays unresolved and is never allocated. awaiting ledger
FAO FishStat sturgeon aquaculture by species, country and year, the leading supply indicator, labelled "not caviar output". awaiting ingestion
Status labels: official reported by an official body; estimated Cavport estimate; industry estimate industry body estimate; awaiting ledger framed, not drawn, until sourced data exists. The full list of what Cavport does not yet publish is on Data discipline.