Yellow onion prices

Yellow is the default cooking onion and the variety with the deepest commercial base of the four: it is grown at nearly every origin this site tracks, from the Idaho-Eastern Oregon and Columbia Basin storage crops through the spring and summer desert districts. Its pungency and firm skin make it the best keeper of the four varieties, which is why the fall storage crop that carries the market from harvest through spring is planted mostly in yellow.

The origins behind these quotes run as a relay. Texas and the California desert cut the new crop in spring, the San Joaquin Valley and southern New Mexico carry the summer, and the Northwest storage crop is harvested in late summer, cured for two to three weeks, and shipped out of the sheds from roughly August into April. Because a storage yellow is drawn from a pot that only shrinks after harvest, the questions that drive the back half of the storage year are how much crop is left in the shed and what condition it is in.

Size splits one field into several prices. Mediums go to the consumer bag trade, jumbos to foodservice and repackers, and colossal and super colossal to buyers who want one onion to do the work of two. The pack menu is the standard wholesale set: 50-lb sacks first, 25-lb sacks behind them, 40-lb cartons where the buyer wants a rigid box. Because yellow has the widest planting base and the most continuous shipping-point coverage of the year, its FOB is the price the trade reads first, with red and white checked against it rather than the other way around.

The seasonal shape is visible in this site's own record. Across the USDA quotes published here since 2021 for the benchmark yellow jumbo in 50-lb sacks, the softest months of the year are September, October and November, when the new Northwest crop is coming out of the field and into storage and supply is at its most plentiful. The firmest run from January through April, once a winter of shipping has drawn the sheds down. That is the storage cycle showing up in price. The crop year is the bigger lever, though. The published quote range on that same spec ran $7.00 to $21.00 in 2021, $12.00 to $30.00 in 2022, $7.00 to $20.00 in 2023, $8.00 to $28.00 in 2024, $5.00 to $14.00 in 2025 and $5.50 to $21.00 so far in 2026. One crop moves yellow further than one season does.

Yellow also has the widest origin coverage of any variety on this site. Eight origins have quoted it since the start of 2024: Idaho-Eastern Oregon and Washington carry the most quote days, then California, New Mexico, the Mexican crossings at south Texas, Texas itself, New York and Wisconsin. Four are quoting in an average month, more than for any other variety, with as many as six in April and as few as two in June and September, when one crop is handing off to the next. That is why yellow is the one variety where the origin relay can be watched inside a single page.

The branded sweet crops are not on this page, even though USDA files most of them as yellow onions. Georgia's Vidalia, Washington's Walla Walla, the Peruvian imports and the Mexican sweets are reported as yellow with a note marking them as sweet, and they sell at a sweet onion's premium in a 40-lb carton. They are read on the sweet onion page, so every quote on this page is the pungent cooking yellow and no quote is counted on both.

Per pound, yellow is the cheapest onion on the board, and not by a little. Set against quotes from the same district on the same day at the same size since the start of 2024, red priced above yellow in every one of more than 3,400 matched pairs, at roughly twice yellow's price per pound, and white priced above yellow in 97 percent of nearly 2,500 pairs, at roughly 1.9 times. A buyer moving volume between varieties is trading that gap, not the sack price.