In this installment of the ‘Agronometrics In Charts’ series, Cristian Crespo F. illustrates how the U.S. market is evolving. Each week the series looks at a different horticultural commodity, focusing on a specific origin or topic visualizing the market factors that are driving change.

For this week's Agronometrics in Charts we will be looking at kiwifruit prices and volumes for the season starting in the U.S. market.

The 2021-22 season in the Northern Hemisphere has begun with stable prices, the highest seen for the same date over the last five years.

Just as the 2020-21 season ended with kiwifruit from Chile and New Zealand, this time the fruit is of California origin, waiting for the first shipments of Italian kiwifruit to arrive.

We can see in the graph below that the average prices for conventional kiwifruit in the U.S. market were US$2.97 per kilogram, a 22 percent increase year-on-year.

Prices being recorded are coming only from California and are the Hayward variety. Although the volume data recorded by the USDA speaks of volumes arriving from Greece, Italy and New Zealand.

Prices of Hayward kiwifruit in the U.S. market (USD/KG)

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

One of the reasons that the North American market has seen stable prices so far this season may be due to the fact that lower volumes of kiwifruit have arrived in recent weeks year-on-year as can be seen in the graph below.

The decrease in these volumes has been registered mainly for fruit from Italy and central California.

Weekly volumes of kiwifruit in the U.S. market (KG)

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

We will be watching very closely to see what happens to prices in the Northern Hemisphere season that has just begun, especially when higher volumes begin to arrive from Greece and Italy and as the U.S. season, specifically California continues to advance.

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 20 fruits we currently track.