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Onion Market Update January 9, 2024
By John Harris
Happy New Year! We are starting the year the same as we finished 2023. Markets are high and supplies are tight. Whites seem to be in the tightest demand, followed by reds, particularly medium reds and large yellows.
The National Onion Association (NOA) storage crop report is not out yet, but I suspect that we will paint a pretty solid picture of how short we are on domestic storage supplies. I watch the daily shipments on the USDA market report pretty closely, and we were consistently in the upper 400s and lower 500s for much of December. Daily shipments like that are generally indicative of a weak market. Obviously, we have had anything but that.
Demand has been so high that the market was able to basically double or more over a month, while sustaining those high shipments. We have settled down to numbers that are more in line with a market like the one we have, with daily shipment numbers in the upper 200s and lower 300s the past week. What we are seeing is these shippers have slowed their daily production down on purpose to ensure that they have enough product to get them through the end of their contract commitments for the season. These contracts usually extend into April and May for a lot of the storage crop shippers. They don’t have a choice, quite honestly.
I fully expect to see the yellow and white market continue to creep up as we continue through the end of January. The red market has been steady, but it still seems that those supplies are not plentiful either, and that market could also continue to rise a bit. Expect whites to be very hard to procure going forward in load quantities, with mixer loads being what these shippers will prefer to see going forward.
Medium reds have also become a little challenging to find, but that seems to change weekly and lot by lot. Supers and colossals have also gotten harder to come by and are demanding a few dollars premium over jumbos right now. I’d only expect that trend to continue for the remainder of the season.
Mexico will start to cross some product in late January/early February, and that will likely take a bit of pressure off. But I’m not sure it will be enough to lower the market much, if at all, especially at the beginning of their season anyway.
I’ll update again in a couple of weeks as we are closer to the end of the month with an update on Mexican onions, and we’ll have storage numbers out by then so there’ll be more to chat about. Have a great week. As always, any comments and opinions are always appreciated.
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.
