White onion prices

White is the narrowest of the three cooking-onion markets this site tracks, and it has the smallest origin base of the three. Six origins have quoted white since the start of 2024: Washington and Idaho-Eastern Oregon carry the most quote days, then New Mexico and California, with the Mexican crossings and Texas behind them. Thinner-skinned and milder than yellow, white is the variety foodservice and fresh-market buyers favor, tying its demand more to that channel than to the long-storage trade the fall crop supplies.

Pack is where white is the simplest of the four to read. In the USDA shipping-point series published here, white quotes almost entirely in 50-lb sacks, jumbo and medium, with effectively no 25-lb sack or 40-lb carton coverage. A white quote and a yellow quote out of the same district are therefore directly comparable, sack for sack, in a way a red quote is not. Kitchen demand explains much of where the crop goes: white is the onion Mexican cooking calls for, standard in salsa, tacos and the foodservice prep around them, and a large share of the volume moves to buyers near the southern crossings and the desert districts.

National white production is small next to yellow's and fewer districts quote it at all, so on a given report day there may be only a handful of white FOB lines in the country. Read a large percentage move on this page against that: a market this narrow can reprice on one district's supply gap. Months with no white quote from an origin are rotation showing up in a small market, not a data outage.

White's price season runs earliest of the three. Across the quotes published here since 2021 for the benchmark white jumbo in 50-lb sacks, the firmest months are December, January and February, and the softest is October. Its high lands ahead of yellow's late-winter peak and well ahead of red's spring one, so the three varieties top out in three different quarters of the year. The published quote range on that spec ran $10.00 to $20.00 in 2021, $14.00 to $38.00 in 2022, $8.00 to $38.00 in 2023, $12.00 to $60.00 in 2024, $10.00 to $30.00 in 2025 and $12.00 to $30.00 so far in 2026. The 2024 top end is not a misprint. It is what a market this narrow can print when one origin's supply gaps.

Against yellow, white carries a standing premium. Comparing quotes from the same district on the same day at the same size and the same 50-lb sack since the start of 2024, white priced above yellow in 97 percent of about 2,300 matched pairs, and averaged close to double yellow's price per sack across them. Against red, white is the cheaper of the two per pound about seven times in ten. Only two to four origins quote white in a given month, against four to eight for yellow.

A note for readers arriving from the export trade. Much of the search traffic for white onion FOB prices comes from the international lane, where Dutch and Belgian shippers quote FOB Antwerp, Rotterdam or Vlissingen for containers moving to Dakar and the rest of West Africa. This page is US shipping-point data and carries no European quote. How that lane prices, packs and ships is covered in the Benelux to West Africa onion trade.