Are pistachios grown in France? Where things stand in 2026

Until 2022, you could have said no without being far wrong. There were pistachio trees in France, but no pistachios to sell. That is no longer true: the first sales date from 2023, and 2026 is the first year the harvest can be counted in tonnes.

How many pistachios does France produce?

We have found no public statistics on French pistachios. The figures going around come from the growers’ union France Pistache, the association Pistache en Provence and the farming press, and they don’t always agree. So we give ranges.

The 2026 figure comes from a grower in the Vaucluse, who speaks of “nearly 10 tonnes gross in France”, without saying whether that is the weight before or after drying. The order of magnitude, though, is not in doubt: the harvest grew more than tenfold in a year.

There is nothing mysterious about this leap. A pistachio tree takes six to seven years to give its first real harvest, and the first orchards of the revival were planted in 2018 and 2019. They are all reaching bearing age at the same time.

Where are pistachios grown in France?

Mainly in Provence. The Vaucluse, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Bouches-du-Rhône départements have most of the plantings, along with the Aude in Occitanie. More than half the area is in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

The “Pistache Méditerranéenne” project, endorsed by the French Ministry of Agriculture, gives the full map: Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, Vaucluse, Ardèche, Drôme, Aude, Gard, Hérault, Pyrénées-Orientales and Corsica. In Occitanie, the Chambre d’agriculture (the regional farming board) counted 33 organic hectares in 2024, more than half of them in the Aude. It was in the Aude, too, at Villarzel-du-Razès, that two brothers planted six hectares as early as 2015, before the revival in Provence.

The Var came a little later than its neighbours. Brignoles, where we are, now has a specialist nursery, and a processing unit has been announced there for late 2027 or for 2028, depending on the source.

Why the South? Because the pistachio tree needs a cold winter, a long dry summer and soil that doesn’t hold water. The details are in the article on growing conditions.

Is pistachio growing new in France?

No, it is a comeback. The ethnobotanist Magali Amir has pieced together its history for the Parc naturel régional du Luberon.

The pistachio tree comes from Central Asia and the Near East. According to Pliny the Elder, it reached Rome from Syria in the 1st century. For France, nobody knows who introduced it, or when. In 1690, the pomologist Jean Merlet noted that more and more were being planted in Provence. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was grown in many villages in Provence and Languedoc: a handbook for Provençal farmers published in Toulon in 1837 mentions it, as does an 1853 paper on growing it in Marseille.

Then it disappeared, and nobody can say exactly when or why. Depending on the source, the crop died out at the end of the 19th century, at the start of the 20th in favour of vines, or in the 1950s for the last trees on Mont Ventoux and in the Luberon. The suggested reasons: winters that were too cold, the trees’ slowness to bear fruit, the difficulty of grafting.

Some witnesses remain. Old pistachio trees survive near Aubagne, in Marseille, in the Crau and in the Luberon. Cézanne painted the one at Le Tholonet around 1900. And the Provençal Christmas crib still has a santon, a Provençal nativity figurine, called lou Pistachié.

Who brought pistachios back to Provence?

The revival began with a confectioner’s question. In 2017, Olivier Baussan, the founder of L’Occitane, the cosmetics brand, wondered where the pistachios in Provençal nougat came from. The Roy René confectionery in Aix-en-Provence was then using five tonnes a year, and none of them grew in Provence.

Things moved quickly after that:

• 2018: the association Pistache en Provence is founded, with Jean-Louis Joseph and André Pinatel among others, two of the people behind the revival of almond growing. About ten hectares are planted in the Vaucluse.
• 2019 to 2021: the Chambre d’agriculture de Vaucluse sets up trial orchards at Mallemort and Manosque, and writes a first growing guide.
• 2021: the growers’ union France Pistache is founded.
• 2023: first sales, at €50 a kilo, to pastry chefs and restaurants.
• October 2024: launch of the collective brand “Pistaches de France”.
• 2026: the first harvest counted in tonnes.

A protected geographical indication (PGI) is mentioned as a long-term goal. As far as we know, no application has been filed yet.

Can French pistachios replace imports?

Not for a long time, and probably never entirely. France imports about 10,000 tonnes of pistachios a year: 10,400 tonnes in 2024, according to customs data reported by L’Écho du Mardi. Other articles put it as high as 15,000 tonnes.

Let’s do the sums. A mature orchard gives between 1 and 1.5 t of dry in-shell pistachios per hectare, according to the industry’s assumptions. Once mature, the current 600 hectares would therefore produce 600 to 900 tonnes, less than a tenth of imports. The target most often quoted, 2,000 hectares by 2035, would mean 2,000 to 3,000 tonnes: a quarter of what France imports today.

On a world scale, the comparison is even starker.

Spain, next door, has more than 85,000 hectares of pistachio trees, three quarters of them in Castilla–La Mancha. France has about one hundred and fortieth of that.

So French pistachios won’t compete on volume. Their place is elsewhere: this year’s harvest, a named variety, a plot you can find on a map. It is the economics of a product with an origin, not of a commodity. That comes at a price, which we explain in the article why pistachios are expensive.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Press release on the 2026 harvest, La Maison de la Pistache, August 2026, in French.
2. 1re grande récolte de la pistache provençale, L’Écho du Mardi, 25 August 2026, in French.
3. En Provence, le pari de la pistache, Vert, 22 September 2026, in French.
4. Provence : la pistache structure sa filière, Réussir Fruits & Légumes, 3 January 2022, in French.
5. Pistaches de France : une marque collective lancée sur le salon Med’Agri, Réussir Fruits & Légumes, 24 October 2024, in French.
6. Fruits à coque : peut-on relocaliser la production bio ?, Réussir, 17 April 2025, in French.
7. La pistache française sur toutes les lèvres, mais pas encore en bouche, Pleinchamp, 26 April 2024, in French.
8. Sur la piste des utopistes de la pistache de Provence, Pleinchamp, 26 October 2022, in French.
9. La pistache, une jeune filière pleine de promesses, Terre-net, 9 June 2025, in French.
10. Fiche pistache bio 2024-2025, Chambre d’agriculture d’Occitanie, in French.
11. Bilan du Plan agriculture Méditerranée en régions, 2024 et 2025, French Ministry of Agriculture, in French.
12. World pistachio harvest forecasts (INC data), Xataka, 18 June 2026, in Spanish.
13. Pas d’apéro sans pistaches françaises : le pari d’agriculteurs en Provence, AFP, 19 June 2019, in French.
14. Peu d’eau, moins de pesticides : la pistache, le futur de l’agriculture ?, Reporterre, 14 August 2024, in French.
15. Le pistachier en Provence, étude ethnobotanique, Magali Amir, Courrier scientifique of the Luberon Regional Nature Park, no. 16, 2019–2020, in French.