In this week's ‘In Charts' installment, Cristian Crespo of data visualization tool Agronometrics illustrates how the U.S. market is evolving. Each week the article will look at a different horticultural commodity, focusing on a specific origin or topic to see what factors are driving change.

Apples are a high-volume fruit commodity which growers need to produce very efficiently in order to be profitable, and the U.S. is no exception to this rule. 

Apples from numerous origins are sold in the U.S. market, which is supplied principally by fruit from Washington State, as can be seen in the chart below.

Average historic arrival volumes of apples in the U.S. market, by origin

Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics. (Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here)

Average historic apple prices in the U.S. market have oscillated between around US$1.00 and US$1.75 per kilo over the last decade.

Historic weekly prices (USD/KG) of apples in the U.S. market

Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics. (Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here)

But in the panorama of apples in the U.S., there is one variety that has stood out from the others - Honeycrisp. This queen of the U.S. apple market has great growth potential and excellent prospects for the future. In the chart below you can see just how significant the price difference is between this variety and many others.

Average prices over the last nine years have been around US$2.5 - US$4 per kilo, at certain times even having fetched prices four-fold higher than other varieties. In 2018, the variety grew by 23% in value and 34% in volume, approaching sales of US$1 billion.

Historic average prices of apples (USD/KG) in the U.S., by variety

Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics. (Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here)

In terms of sizes, the 72s, 80s, and 88s received the best prices.

Prices of Honeycrisp apples (USD/KG) in the U.S. market, by size

Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics. (Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here)

In our ‘In Charts’ series, we work to tell some of the stories that are moving the industry. Feel free to take a look at the other articles by clicking here.

You can keep track of the markets daily through Agronometrics, a data visualization tool built to help the industry make sense of the huge amounts of data that professionals need to access to make informed decisions. If you found the information and the charts from this article useful, feel free to visit us at www.agronometrics.com where you can easily access these same graphs, or explore the other 23 fruits we currently track.