China’s Foie Gras Production Could Surpass France as World’s Leader

Could France‘s goose be cooked?

The Gallic nation’s longstanding position as the world’s top producer of foie gras is currently being challenged by China, which has seen its output of and taste for fatty duck and goose liver surge in the last decade. In 2025, China produced 14,000 tons of foie gras, a 30 percent increase year over year, according to Reuters, while France’s output fell slightly to 15,044 tons. And China now makes up 45 percent of the global supply of the delicacy, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“It’s worrying that they’re developing so quickly,” Fabien Chevalier, chair of the French foie gras industry group CIFOG, told Reuters. “We didn’t see them coming like that.”

The growth has been charged by the Chinese state, which has subsidized farms to encourage economic development in rural areas. That investment has helped stand up large-scale farms, which have driven production increases. For instance, Changhao Biotechnology is projecting that it will make 500 tons of foie gras this year despite being a mid-sized producer, while the average French farmer makes around 10 tons, Reuters reports. The scale of the operations has brought down the cost of the food and made it more accessible than French foie, which can be more than double the price.

Currently, much of the foie gras China produces is consumed domestically, as people put it in their fried rice, dip it in hot pots, or enjoy foie gras ice cream for dessert. Regulations have made it more difficult for Chinese producers to sell abroad, but they are starting to eye global expansion, with some selling into Dubai and Macao. The E.U. is preparing for a wave of Chinese foie gras by putting up barriers to imports that include rules on labeling that don’t allow foreign producers to pass their product off as something made in Europe.

What China is doing with this delicacy mirrors how it has inserted itself as the global leader in caviar. It has stood up industrial farms to produce the cured fish eggs at a larger scale, producing caviar of such a high quality that an exacting chef like Thomas Keller is willing to build his Regiis Ova label around sturgeon farmed in Central China.

Unlike caviar, though, Chinese foie gras will also face headwinds in America as animal-rights activists continue fighting to get the duck and goose liver banned. New York City’s prohibition has been stuck in the courts for years, and California’s law that essentially disallows restaurants from selling it (people can buy from out-of-state producers to eat themselves) could keep a larger market for Chinese foie from developing Stateside.