# Storage onions vs fresh-market onions > Storage onions are pungent yellows that are cured after harvest and held for months, so the Northwest crop becomes a national inventory drawn down all winter. Sweet onions barely store at all, which is why late-winter and spring pricing hinges on how much storage crop is left and what condition it is in. _Updated Aug 20, 2026._ Storage onions are quoted at mostly $14.00 (Washington jumbo, 50 lb sacks) FOB at the shipping point, the live yellow storage-crop benchmark this site tracks across origins. FOB means the price of the onions loaded onto a truck at the packing shed, before freight, so a delivered price adds the haul on top. [Yellow onion prices](/variety/yellow) carries the same benchmark broken out by origin. Europe's reference number is a different measure of a different market: Dutch and Belgian onions left for export at €256 a tonne (Comext monthly, data through June 2026), tracked on [Benelux onion export prices](/export/benelux). That is a declared customs value per tonne rather than a shipping-point quote, so it belongs beside the US FOB figure rather than against it. Storage onions are the pungent yellows that are cured after harvest and held in storage for months, and they are why the country can eat Northwest onions in February. Sweet onions are the opposite: they do not store, they sell fresh off the current harvest and then they are gone. That split, a crop you can bank versus a crop you cannot, drives the shape of the whole onion year. ## What makes an onion a storage onion It comes down to curing and chemistry. After harvest, storage onions are dried and cured for about two to three weeks, until the necks are tight and the outer scales are papery and dry. That dormancy is what lets them hold. A well-cured pungent yellow can keep for six to nine months in cold storage. Idaho-Eastern Oregon's crop is the textbook case: harvested in late summer, cured, stored and shipped out steadily from roughly August through April. Higher sulfur, more pungency and a dry tight neck are what a storage onion is built on. ## Why sweets are a different market Sweet onions, the Vidalias, the Walla Wallas, the Texas 1015s, are low in the pungency that preserves a bulb. Mild and high in moisture, they keep for weeks, not months, so they cannot be a stored inventory. They ship fresh during their origin's window and that is it. That is why a Vidalia is a spring onion and not a January onion, and why sweets trade as their own market rather than as part of the storage-onion pool. Do not read a sweet-onion price as a signal about the yellow storage crop. They are different animals. ## Why spring is the tight season The storage crop is a fixed pot that only shrinks. Once the Northwest is harvested in late summer, no more is coming until the next harvest, so every month of winter draws the inventory down. By late winter and spring two things bite at once. Volume is running low, and the onions still in storage have been there the longest, so shrink and quality risk are highest. Late-season storage pricing hinges on exactly those two things: how much crop is left and what condition it is in. When a storage crop comes up short, as the Northwest did in the tight 2022 to 2023 season with its tonnage well below normal, the back half of the storage year is where it shows in price. [Table: Yellow onion prices](https://knowyouronions.news/variety/yellow) ([data](https://knowyouronions.news/variety/yellow.md)) The table above is the live yellow FOB reading, the storage crop's own price, set against its recent history. Yellow is where the drawdown shows up first, because yellow is what the sheds are full of. Watch the year-scale rows rather than the weekly one for the shape of a storage season, and see [the onion price trend](/trend/onion-prices) for how the same benchmark has moved across the last several years. ## Watch a storage season on the chart [Chart: Idaho-Eastern Oregon onion FOB by variety, size and pack](https://knowyouronions.news/origin/idaho-eastern-oregon) ([data](https://knowyouronions.news/origin/idaho-eastern-oregon.md) — chart image: https://knowyouronions.news/charts/origin/idaho-eastern-oregon/chart.png) The Idaho-Eastern Oregon chart above is a storage season drawn out. Follow it from the fall, when new-crop onions come into storage and prices set their opening level, across the winter as the inventory draws down, into the spring when supply tightens. Then watch the line go quiet in late spring, because the crop is sold out and the shed is empty until the next harvest. That gap is not missing data. It is the storage crop finishing its year, exactly on schedule. Know Your Onions reports storage-crop prices as USDA publishes them. We do not forecast how a storage season will end. We read it off the quotes as it draws down. ## Related data + guides - [Idaho-Eastern Oregon prices](https://knowyouronions.news/origin/idaho-eastern-oregon) - [Yellow onion prices](https://knowyouronions.news/variety/yellow) - [The onion price trend](https://knowyouronions.news/trend/onion-prices) - [The US onion calendar](https://knowyouronions.news/guides/the-onion-calendar) - [Sweet onion prices](https://knowyouronions.news/variety/sweet) ## Common questions ### What is the current storage onion FOB price? mostly $14.00 (Washington jumbo, 50 lb sacks) at the shipping point, the yellow storage-crop benchmark, from USDA shipping-point reports. [Yellow onion prices](/variety/yellow) breaks the same quote out by origin, and the [weekly movers board](/board/weekly-movers) shows which origins are quoting and which way they moved this week. ### How does storage onion pricing compare to fresh-market onion pricing? They behave differently because the supply behaves differently. A storage crop is a fixed pot that only shrinks: once the Northwest is harvested in late summer, nothing more is coming until the next harvest, so the price tends to firm through the winter and hardest in the spring, when volume is lowest and the remaining onions have been in storage longest. A fresh-market crop like a sweet onion has no inventory behind it at all, so its price answers to the current harvest and the shipping window, then the market simply ends when the crop is gone. A sweet-onion quote is never a signal about the storage crop. ### How long do storage onions keep? A well-cured pungent yellow holds roughly six to nine months in cold storage. Curing is what makes that possible: after harvest the onions are dried for about two to three weeks until the necks are tight and the outer scales are papery. Higher sulfur and lower moisture are what separate a storage onion from a sweet one, which keeps for weeks rather than months. --- Canonical URL: https://knowyouronions.news/guides/storage-onions-vs-fresh-market