Important political and institutional relationships exist between most grain‐trading partners. In many cases the purpose of these relationships is to enhance importer loyalty to a particular exporter. This paper tests for loyalty in the world wheat market. Loyalty is measured by repeat purchases. An application of the Markov model is used to analyse loyalty and to explain international trade flows in wheat. Results show that in general the United States has relatively strong import loyalty compared to the other exporters such as Canada and the European Communit