How Expensive Are Fruits, Really?
There has been a ton of chatter about the grocery prices as of late. Inflation ballooned during the pandemic period, and despite the federal reserve’s best efforts, many are still reeling from the higher prices that resulted from that period of high inflation.
One of the major points that president-elect Donald Trump ran on in his 2024 campaign was lowering the cost of grocery items. Namely, the cost of eggs.
But are groceries as expensive as people make them out to be? It depends. Staple complex carbohydrates like corn and wheat are grown domestically in the United States. Corn syrup is used in so many processed foods because of how cheap it is to manufacture. It doesn't require any sort of foreign imports to make, while being irresistibly delicious. The domestic availability factor is the reason we consistently reach out to the corn substance and not, say, agave syrup.
Fruit is a little different, though. Fruits are seasonally grown, can only grow in specific environments, and need to be kept in specific conditions to remain fresh for the end consumer. As such, there is a large degree of variability in how much certain fruits cost.
This makes fruits act as a microcosm of the grocery market. Looking at the prices of fruits can leave clues as to the economic viability of foreign imports from certain countries over others. It can also reveal characteristics of the fruits themselves. Which are more likely to spoil? Which are harder to grow?
This write-up will explore these trends and help to demystify the sometimes massive differences in how certain fruits are priced, relative to the rest of the market. It'll tackle all of fruit's different marketable forms. Fresh, canned, juiced, nothing is off limits.
Let's dive in.
Fresh
Looking at the full graph, there are a few trends that jump out immediately. For one, small fruits like berries are far more likely to be expensive. Interestingly, tropical fruits are the least expensive, despite needing to grow in very specific environments.
Raspberries ($7.73/lb) and blackberries ($6.75/lb) are among the most expensive fruits when bought fresh. This is because they are both small, fragile berries. Berries are always hand-picked, being very difficult to automate due to their variability in time to ripen and their small size. Raspberries are especially bad, being extremely quick to spoil and picky about the season they grow in.1 Special care needs to be put into their harvest and transport to ensure that they aren't crushed or spoiled by the time they reach the final buyer. This explains its price nearly doubling that of the third most expensive fruit, cherries.
Cherries ($4.66/lb) also fall victim to the small fruit problem and are difficult to automate because of that fact. They're hard to grow well, being grown mainly in a 4-month period between late spring and early summer in California, Oregon, and Washington. They are also not ripe for very long, needing to be carefully monitored to ensure they don't spoil.2
Strawberries ($2.97/lb) suffer from the berry problem, but are a little bigger and tougher. Additionally, strawberries can grow in a variety of climates and soil types, which gives growers much more flexibility in how they are grown. They have a longer growing season, which helps to extend their supply window.
An aside...
The abundance and affordability of tropical fruits is deeply tied to Caribbean labor exploitation dating back to the late 1800s. You can read more about it here.
Narrowing in on the tropical fruits reveals that mangoes ($1.47/lb) are easily the most expensive of the bunch, easily doubling the price of pineapples ($0.62/lb) and bananas ($0.60/lb). Considering that they all grow in similar climates, this doesn't make much sense at first. However, mangoes are heavier than bananas without having the rugged exterior that pineapples and watermelons do. They need to be specially packaged to ensure that they both won't smash other fruits and won't get smashed themselves.
But watermelons ($0.38/lb) are incredibly heavy, right? So why would they be the cheapest fruit to buy fresh? For one, watermelons have tough rinds that keep bacteria and animals out. This means that growers don't need to worry about cutting into their profit margins buying pesticides. Since watermelons greatly vary in size, grocery supply chains will usually buy the cheapest watermelons (small ones) in order to pass those savings on to the consumer. Buyers won't notice a small drop in quality, but they will notice an increase in price.
Since we are comparing prices pound-for-pound, watermelons enjoy a distinct advantage here, being both heavy (full of water!) and easy to distribute since it doesn't take many of them to fill up a pallet.
Frozen
At first glance, frozen fruit seems to mirror that of fresh berries. In some ways, this is true. The rankings are exactly the same, with raspberries being on top for most expensive, followed by blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries. However, the deviation between fruit prices is much tighter this time around.
Try swapping between frozen and fresh prices and pay close attention to the levels. You can see the gap between blackberries and blueberries visibly close when the label swaps from fresh to frozen. Looking at the y-axis, you can see that frozen raspberries ($6.16/lb) cost over a dollar less than buying them fresh ($7.73/lb). Frozen berries just cost less than their fresh counterparts.
Why? Because frozen produce can be kept nearly indefinitely. Since berries are quick to perish, distributors can keep their existing supply of berries for longer, and have a grace period between harvesting and delivering to the end consumer.
This is absolutely vital when you consider that berries very beholden to their harvest seasons.3 When frozen, berries can last well into the winter months where fresh fruit would go bad. The savings that come from this long-term storage are passed on to the consumer, leading to frozen berries costing anywhere from $0.34 to $1.57 less than they would if they were picked fresh.
Canned
Cherries immediately jump out as an outlier here. Most of the fruits average around $2/lb, but cherries sit at a staggering $5.24/lb. This is for a few reasons. For one, the other fruits are significantly larger than cherries, and thus distributors need to fill a single can with way more cherries for a can of the same volume. Also, the canning process can add a decent amount to cost. Even if the aluminum used in the cans themselves are cheap, the cherries need to be processed in a factory that they wouldn't have otherwise visited, which adds a non-insignificant amount to shipping costs, especially when travelling internationally. As stated, cherries are also just expensive.
Comparing to fresh fruit again, flipping back-and-forth shows that cherries are expensive no matter the form. Switching to fresh only subtracts $0.58 from the final cost. The other fruits are far more interesting, however.
It's important to mention that while the canning process can be pricey and time-consuming, the resulting product is shelf stable, unlike fresh fruit. This gives canned fruits a distinct advantage in the supply chain.
This is particularly relevant when talking about apricots, which sell at $3.62/lb when fresh, and drop down to $2.24 when canned. That is a $1.38 difference! This goes against conventional wisdom in that you pay a premium for canned goods and their shelf stability. While not as extreme, peaches follow this trend too, falling $0.17 under the cost of buying fresh.
So why is this? The best explanation can be found by observing their peak season. Peaches and apricots are both at their peak harvest during the summer months. Apricots specifically tend to grow erratically, having a tiny window in which they are ripe and ready to eat.4 Distributors trying to sell fresh apricots need to time their shipping to ensure that the apricot gets in the hands of the consumer with at least a day or two's worth of a grace period before ripeness. Even if everything goes perfectly, grocery stores can't cycle out apricots daily, and some apricots may sit on the shelf longer than others.
If distributors can the fruits themselves, however, they are able to capture the fruit in its peak ripeness and keep it from developing any further. This gives suppliers much more control over how the consumer will enjoy the product instead of passing the fresh fruit over to a grocer and hoping for the best.
Dried
Dried fruits are more expensive on average than any other type of fruit for one simple reason. Volume. The majority of what gives fruits their shape is water. It's why grapes explode in your mouth and why watermelon tastes so crunchy. Water is a large part of what makes fruits work, along with the natural sugars (fructose and glucose), of course.
Having little to no water means that you can pack far more of a given fruit in the same container. You can easily put double the number of dried cherries in the same container as one with fresh cherries, for example.5 It's important to note raisins as an important outlier here, though. When considering their significant shrink in volume, they are really not that much more expensive than raw grapes ($3.99/lb). This is often due to raisins being made from lower quality "Thompson" grapes.6
As a refresher, here they are compared to their fresh and canned forms. Even by looking at the y-axis ticks alone, it's clear that dried fruit are in an entirely different league of pricing. You're going to be paying a lot more than canned options, and fresh fruit is still significantly cheaper if you don't mind losing the shelf stability.
Any kind of advantage that dried fruit would have had due to shelf stability is completely lost in the volume argument. That doesn't make dried fruit bad, though. Just different. You will likely end up paying more upfront, but you will receive more in caloric intake for that money.
... Juice?
It might seem silly to place Juice on the same playing field as fresh, frozen, or canned options (despite MyPlate pushing it since 2011). In some ways, it is. Nutritionally, fruit juices bypass the stomach's digestion of the fiber present in whole fruits that support your gut microbiome.7 They also tend to include nasty sweeteners like corn syrup. With that said, fruit juice prices are still tied to the abundance of the fruits that they are derived from.
The standout here is pomegranate ($3.28/pint). It nearly triples everything else on the chart, with everything else hovering around a little over a dollar. So why is this?
It's surprisingly simple. Only 56% of a given pomegranate is directly edible.8 The inconvenience of needing to ship the entire fruit only for the seeds to be thrown out before being processed in a juicer is a waste of space and weight that could have gone to another fruit instead. Additionally, the fruit is quite difficult to cut, so very often humans have to prepare the fruits for processing by hand. It's a very expensive process, and those costs are handed off to the consumer.
In Conclusion...
Fruits have a lot more character than meets the eye. The way they are bought, sold, and moved around is directly linked to each fruit's distinct set of quirks. There is always a reason a particular fruit is priced the way it is. Oftentimes it comes down to how much manpower (or lack thereof) is required to get it from the plant to your grocery store.
I exclusively leaned on bar graphs for this story because they are exceptionally good at showing off comparisons. I was initially planning on using a line graph to show the differences in pricing over time, playing off of the COVID-era inflationary spike. Unfortunately, the data I needed didn't offer the granularity I was looking for, so I decided to keep things simple instead.
If I were to expand upon this project in the future, I would include animations to grow and shrink the bars when the button to change the form of fruit was clicked. I would also include range sliders on the pricing axis, so viewers can zoom in on minute differences between bars. This would have helped in the Canned and Juice sections, since it is quite difficult to tell the difference between the bottom 4 bars unless you rely heavily on the hover/tap tooltip.
Design wise, I would also include illustrations on top of each bar. It would give each fruit a visual representation apart from the colored bar, making it easier for the viewer to make a visual connection between the fruit and its cost. I would also replace the header illustrations with more relevant illustrations (i.e. a vintage ice cube for the Frozen section), but that would be highly dependent on the assets I have at my disposal. Despite these small gripes, I would largely consider this project a success.