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 summer desert districts and the Vidalia crop in Georgia. 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. Ten origins have quoted it since the start of 2024: Washington and Idaho-Eastern Oregon carry the most quote days, then California, New Mexico, the Mexican crossings at south Texas, Texas itself, New York, Peru, Georgia and Wisconsin. Four to eight of them are usually quoting in any given month, which is why the chart above rarely thins out, and why yellow is the one variety where the origin relay can be watched handing off inside a single page.

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 3,300 matched pairs, at roughly twice yellow's price per pound, and white priced above yellow in 97 percent of about 2,300 pairs, at roughly 1.9 times. A buyer moving volume between varieties is trading that gap, not the sack price.