Boom and Gloom in Produce Fields

That popping sound you heard last week wasn’t your thermometer breaking; it was the produce bubble bursting.

All summer, people have been warning that it would happen. An entire spring and early summer of fruits and vegetables--pent up and delayed by wet, cool weather--came on the market at the same time.

Consider a few examples: Tomatoes, which were selling at wholesale in Los Angeles for $17 to $21 a case just two weeks ago, now go for $5 to $7.50 case. (Retail prices are only loosely tied to wholesale prices anymore, so your neighborhood grocery may not reflect these changes.) Peaches that were $20 to $29 a case are now $12 to $14. Cantaloupes that were $8 to $9 a case are now $5 to $6.

And there’s more to come. Artichokes, which were scarce all through their normal spring peak harvest, are coming on strong. And we’ve just begun to see the peaking of the tree fruit.

Ed Beckman, president of the California Tomato Commission, probably speaks for everyone when he says, “We went from shortages to too much almost overnight.”

“Our fall artichoke harvest is going to be 25% to 30% above normal, and that’s going to last through September and maybe even into the first couple of weeks of October,” says Joe Micheli, harvesting manager of Ocean Mist Farms, one of California’s leading artichoke growers.

To put that into perspective, the fall artichoke harvest is normally about half of spring’s. Given the paucity of artichokes this spring and the projected increase this fall, the two could be almost even. That’s the kind of year it’s been.

“We’re going to have a lot of peak volume in August,” says Gary Van Sickle of the California Tree Fruit Agreement. “That’s the volume we normally would have had in mid- to late-July. It looks now like we’ll have ample supplies well into September and those Last Chance peaches will probably go clear into the end of October.”

Probably the hardest hit so far is the tomato industry. “The tomato market is bad,” says Beckman, “with an exclamation point.

“The problem is that there was a shortage of tomatoes in the U.S.,” Beckman says. “Everyone was scrambling to fill orders and everyone was ordering. I don’t think some people were paying a whole lot of attention to the amount of buying that was actually taking place.

“Temperatures in a lot of the country are so high that people aren’t buying as much. We’re hearing reports from some supermarkets that their sales are down 15% to 20%.

“So we’ve got coolers across the country filled with very expensive tomatoes. And they’ve decided they’re not going to buy any more until they get rid of the ones they’ve got.

“And all of that happened just as California was peaking.”

To remedy the situation a bit, tomato growers are voluntarily stopping harvest for a couple of days this week to reduce the amount of produce on the market.

But you get the feeling they may be trying to swim against a rising tide.

“We’re the first to admit that quality on the front end of the harvest was not all that great. It had rained for six months,” Beckman says. “Now we’ve got quality, but the demand is just not there.”