Onion Market Update for Oct. 5, 2022

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Yellow Market Has Lowered, Whites and Reds Steady

By John Harris

I spent all of last week in Treasure Valley in our Ontario office.  It was a great week to get out and visit the local growers and packers in the fields and in the sheds.  We visited quite a few storage sheds as well, to look at harvested product.  Size profile was a mixed bag.  There were certainly sheds with ample size in them and plenty with smaller than what would be considered ideal for that area as well.  Most of all, the Treasure Valley is just down overall tonnage due to the smaller overall size profile.  Harvest in that area will overall be wrapping up by next week for most of the acreage, not only in Idaho-Eastern Oregon, but in Washington as well.  There will certainly be some harvesting that does go further into the month of October, but weather the last week and for the next week is ideal and that will allow things to wrap up without too much pressure from Mother Nature.

Yellows – The market has lowered itself slowly over the past 2 weeks and is starting to really settle in.  There is a pretty large price gap between mediums and jumbos again this year, similar to last year.  That theme will likely continue all season this year.  Once harvest is wrapped up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the jumbo yellow market actually go back up just a little.  Once there isn’t any more pressure to make room in the long term storage buildings, the need to press to move will subside.  I’m not sure there is going to be any upward movement on the medium side however. 

Whites – The white market feels incredibly stable right now.  Demand is steady and with what is in the barn, it seems to match what is being marketed as prices on both mediums and jumbos are pretty close to each other.  Whites have always been able to maintain a higher FOB and this year looks like we’ll sustain the current market levels we are at now for the upcoming months without many fluctuations. 

Reds – Jumbo red market is maintaining a steady market on 25# and 50# sales.  The red sizing came off a little smaller in all areas than we would have like to see and there seems to be a pretty good price gap between jumbos and mediums in the red category as well.  Smaller size jumbo reds have become industry standard in the last couple of years and that will be the case again this year.  Medium reds will be an opportunity buy for the next several months for customers that can use them.  I believe the jumbo and medium red market will have a lot of close parallels to the yellow market as the season progresses.

We are into longer day varieties with full-skin at most sheds and we should see overall quality become very consistent. I’d expect very few issues and generally good quality across the board for the next several months the deeper into storage season we get.

As always, any questions or comments are always welcome.  I’ll get another update out again in the next week or 10 days as things change.  Have a great week!

Editors Note: John Harris is the president and founder of Paradigm Fresh and Colorado Cold Connect in Fort Morgan, Colorado. He can be reached at John@paradigmfresh.com.