I was talking with an East Coast distributor the other day who mentioned that fruit buying patterns have been unusually hard to anticipate.
“I talked to a lot of buyers and a lot of different types of organizations and we’re all saying the same thing. It’s very strange,” the operator said.
I mentioned the USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program and wondered out loud whether the program’s requirement for domestic produce was perhaps skewing the markets.
In fact, he said that may be part of the current dynamics, as he said that Mexican flames are selling at a discount to their Coachella Valley counterparts.
Even so, the estimated volume of the Food Box Program is only a million boxes (10 to 30 pounds each) per day; domestic and imported weekly produce shipments are closer to 50 million 40-pound cartons, according to USDA statistics. So it may be stretching credulity to see a connection between the food box program and market conditions.
Here are a couple of price charts shows pricing comparisons between domestic and imported options of the same commodity.
What say you? Is the Farmers to Families Food Box Program bending f.o.b. markets toward domestic options?
