Managing Fresh Produce Market Seasonality Using Gro

It’s well known that fresh produce prices see seasonal movement, but actually quantifying the moves allows for more systematic decision-making both in the short and long-term. Below are two examples of the insights that can be gained by looking at price data of fresh produce at a granular level.

Produce buyers who examine month-on-month price changes in detail can anticipate trends and systematically lock in supplies ahead of seasonal price surges, or lock in longer-term prices and supplies of items that see strong demand throughout a season.

These insights are made possible by using fresh produce price data available on the Gro platform to construct price seasonality heatmaps like the ones shown below.

In these examples, we apply this approach to analyzing blueberry and avocado markets in the US, but this can be done for hundreds of fresh produce items using the Gro API.

Blueberries

The price of blueberries in the US falls in May as the California season starts, but some pack sizes see prices fall almost twice as sharply as others. We also see prices tick upward at the end of summer. But a closer look shows that the price of 18-ounce packages of conventional blueberries jumps even higher and continues rising through the fall even as other prices level off. Organic blueberry prices, by contrast, stay relatively stable most of the year.

Avocados

Looking at month-on-month changes in avocado prices reveals a surprisingly sharp price spike for Greenskin avocados in July, ahead of the seasonal peak that Hass avocados see in August. It also shows organic Greenskin avocados defying the Super Bowl price spike in February.

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.