How this site works
Produce Price Tracker shows what fruit and vegetables cost this week, whether that’s cheap or pricey for the time of year, and where wholesale prices are likely to go next. It’s free, has no ads and needs no sign-up.
Who runs it
It was built and is run by a former produce buyer for a large New York distributor, who bought daily at the Hunts Point market and knows the packs, counts and seasons behind these numbers. The calls on the wholesale pages (firming, softening, what to do about it) use the trade’s own language and buying practice.
Where the numbers come from
- Grocery prices: USDA’s National Retail Report, the produce sale prices in supermarket flyers each week and how many stores ran each sale, nationwide.
- Wholesale prices: USDA AMS Market News terminal market reports for New York (Hunts Point), Los Angeles and Chicago, plus shipping-point reports and shipment volumes.
- In season: USDA SNAP-Ed’s Seasonal Produce Guide.
- Inflation: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for food at home, so prices from earlier years compare fairly.
How the pages are made
Every market evening a program downloads the latest USDA reports and rebuilds every page from the data. Nobody edits the prices by hand. “Usual” is the same weeks of the year in earlier years, in today’s dollars: the cheapest quarter of those weeks counts as a great or low price, the highest quarter as pricey or high.
Wholesale forecasts come from a statistical model tested the honest way: each past year was predicted using only data from before it. The results, misses included, are on the track record page.
The site’s code was written with the help of AI coding tools. The pages themselves are generated from USDA data by that code; no AI writes the daily prices or calls.
What it isn’t
Grocery prices are flyer sale prices, which can differ from your store’s shelf price. Wholesale prices are market reports, not a supplier’s quote. Forecasts are ranges, not promises.