Sweet onion prices

Sweet is defined by flavor rather than color: low sulfur content and higher water and sugar give these onions a mild taste, and the market's two best-known sources, Vidalia in Georgia and Walla Walla in Washington, both grow onions bred and marketed for that trait. Texas ships the third of the famous sweets, the 1015, out of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in spring.

Unlike the storage crop, sweet onions ship on short calendars rather than year-round. Vidalia runs from spring into late summer under federal Marketing Order 955, which fixes the annual pack date before which no onion may be sold as a Vidalia, and Walla Walla is a summer-only crop. Both go quiet the rest of the year, and so does this page, which is normal rotation and not a gap in the data. Which of the sweet crops reaches this page and which lands elsewhere on the site is worth knowing, and is set out below.

The mildness that sells a sweet onion is the same trait that stops it keeping. Low pungency means low storage life, weeks rather than the six to nine months a cured yellow will hold, so a sweet crop is sold off the current harvest rather than banked as inventory. That shows in the pack: the deepest sweet series on this site run in 40-lb cartons, the rigid box a thin-skinned onion needs, rather than the 50-lb sack that carries the storage trade.

Because a sweet onion serves a different use than a pungent cooking onion, demand for it does not substitute for yellow, red or white. Its FOB runs on its own calendar, tied to two short harvest windows and to origin branding, not to the storage cycle that sets the rest of the market.

One thing to know about how sweet onions reach this page, because it explains why it can be quiet while a sweet season is plainly still running. USDA does not file every sweet onion under a variety of its own. On the shipping-point reports this site reads, the Texas 1015 crop out of the Lower Rio Grande Valley is quoted as yellow marked sweet, and that is what lands here: 40-lb cartons, jumbo and colossal, through March and April. Georgia's Vidalia crop and Washington's Walla Walla crop are quoted as yellow onions carrying a property that names them, Granex marked sweet and Walla Walla Sweets, so those lines land on the yellow and origin pages instead of this one.

So this page runs on a Texas spring calendar, and the rest of the sweet trade has to be read elsewhere on the site. The published quote range on the Texas sweet jumbo carton is $17.00 to $21.00 across the two seasons in this site's record. For the two branded crops the reports file under yellow, the Georgia origin page carries the Vidalia carton quotes, the Washington origin page carries Walla Walla, and the 40-lb carton page shows the pack all three of them sell in, origin against origin.