After record volumes of Blueberry production over the last four weeks, we still expect significant production over the next 15-21 days. The Opi (1111) season is coming to an end quickly but some other growers and regions will pick up the slack. We are expecting the volume to drop from the peak. Volumes in WA and SA continue to trend upward, with SA recording their fourth-largest scan week. WA is also seeing good volumes, with the first production of late varieties also coming online.
Strawberries from the Winter QLD production are going to come under pressure with the extreme heat at the start of the week (32-35 degrees) and an extremely warm weekend and start to next week. I would expect that a lot of farms will finish up at the back end of this week to avoid potential quality issues. Victorian/SA fruit will pick up a lot of slack in the coming weeks as we see the transition from Winter to Summer production (from 2nd year plants), with volumes expected to jump significantly in the next 7-14 days.
Raspberries, whilst coming off a very quiet week, are expected to ramp up in the next 7-10 days, and due to the increased activity on other Berries, we expect prices to come under pressure rapidly. It’s expected that we might see one or more retailers looking to get to $4 retail by next week (or maybe even slightly below in one state). Performance across all states has been very similar (lowest volumes across the winter) over the last few weeks.
Blackberries continue their strong performance vs last year, with their highest volumes since March 2023. We expect this to continue in the coming weeks and challenge other berries for display space and additional space in stores.
With all the activity on berries, there will be cannibalisation and whilst there might be less volume around, price points might become stickier, meaning that they hold lower retail prices as volume drops to pull through the same amount of volume. We saw this in the Winter strawberry season, and it’s very likely to happen in other categories whilst we see big numbers of volume being produced in the next 4 weeks.
