Best Articles of 2018

Rounding off on the year we are happy to publish the articles that have been best received by our readers. The measure used is a combination of readership from the articles published on Freshfruitportal.com, readership from the blog and referrals received to the Agronometrics.com from either source. After some number crunching here is our best of for 2018.

As an added bonus, all the charts to these reports have been updated with live links, so that users can access these reports with up to date values live on Agronometrics.com

1. Blueberries in Charts: With prices at their highest so far this year, will they continue to rise?

2. Blueberries in Charts: Peru, reshaping the U.S. blueberry market

3. Lemons in Charts: Massive import growth in tandem with rising prices

4. Avocados in Charts: Mexico could see high fall prices despite U.S. supply forecast

5. Grapes in Charts: How will Peru’s sharp volume increase affect the U.S. market?

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Fruit in Charts: The winners and losers of 2018 (Part 3 of 3)

This article is the culmination of two previous posts that explored which commodities grew the most and the least through prices and volumes in both 2018 and over the last eight years. You can catch up on those previous articles with the following links:
The Winners and Losers of 2018 (Part 1 of 3)
The Winners and Losers of 2018 (Part 2 of 3)

In the process of writing the previous two articles, we saw that many of the commodities that had the highest prices also had the lowest volumes, and vice-versa. This begs the question, where are the best opportunities in this industry, where is growth and how do we define it? So in this article we will look at creating an index that combines the two factors and see if it can shed some light on this.

One of the most contentious commodities of 2018 was avocados, which saw the biggest drop in average yearly price compared with all other commodities we track. Avocados also saw one of the largest increases in volume of any commodity that we track. In …

Fruit in Charts: The winners and losers of 2018 (Part 2 of 3)

Here is part two of three looking at the winners and losers of 2018. The previous article was based on pricing information made available by the USDA market data, and here we will look at the volume data.

The USDA’s volume data is one of the most complete representations of a market available everywhere – not only considering imports to the U.S., but national production to a large extent as well. In 2018 we also saw a big improvement to the data set, which now offers more complete information for several commodities (mostly citrus), which used to only partially include U.S. production. Average Yearly Volumes by Commodity (Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics)
[Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here]
In the table below we can see the ranking of commodities by percentage of growth, which offers some good insights when considering the commercialization of the fruit the data set is trying to represent. By far the biggest increase in volume is for lemons and or…

Pears in Charts: Recent pricing pushed below previous years’ levels

Taking a look at the pear markets, the first thing that struck me when I began researching this dataset is that the market appears to be in decline, which I haven't found to be very common among the different commodities we work with. From the available data it seems that 2015 was pears’ best year, after which volumes began to decrease, dropping by almost one fourth since their high point of 2012.

Initially, the drop in volume coincided with increases in pricing, but that trend has since tapered off, seeing both a drop in price and volume over the last two years. This tells me that the demand for pears is waning. At the same, time other fruits are seeing growth, so it appears that consumers are choosing to spend their dollars on other products, which has been eating into pears’ market share within the produce aisle. I don’t have any objective data on what products are taking market share from pears, but any comments or opinions on the subject would be more than welcome.

Pear Non O…

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