How we track New York wholesale produce prices
Updated October 14, 2026 · 420 produce items, 350 with at least six months of weekly quotes.
Where the prices come from
Every price on this site is the lowest wholesale price we observed that week from a single supplier serving the New York market. It is not an average across the market, it is not an official quotation, and it is not a retail price.
That supplier is a distributor delivering restaurants in the New York area. We say New York wholesale market because that is the market it serves — not because the prices are collected at the Hunts Point Terminal Market. They are not. If you need the official terminal quotations, they are published by the USDA and we link to them below.
Why prices are never converted between units
Most produce here is quoted by the case, and cases are not the same size: a 40 lb carton, a 24-count box, a bunch sold each. We always print the price with the supplier's own packaging — $29.00 / 40LB case — and never on its own.
We also never divide a case price by a weight to produce a price per pound. Doing so would require a case weight that the supplier does not guarantee, and the result would look like a measurement while being an estimate. A number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.
This is also why our comparison tool works on indexed trends rather than price levels: comparing a 40 lb carton with a single bunch would say more about packaging than about the market.
Seasonality and sourcing origins
Availability and origins come from a separate documentary reference, built from USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reports for the New York Terminal Market and from industry sources. Each origin is labelled by how we know it:
- observed at market — read in a dated terminal market report for this product.
- observed for this category — read in a report for the product's category, then applied to it. Most items fall here.
- trade calendar — taken from an industry sourcing calendar, not from a dated quotation.
Products for which we found no reliable source carry no season and no origin at all, rather than a plausible guess.
What we do not know
- We track one supplier. Another distributor may quote the same item differently on the same day.
- Prices are negotiated per customer. What we publish is the lowest observed quote, not what any given restaurant pays.
- Weekly granularity: a price that moved mid-week appears the following Monday.
Official quotations
The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes daily terminal market prices for New York, in the public domain. We use those reports to document sourcing origins, never as a source of prices — they cover a different level of the supply chain. Ours are distributor prices; theirs are terminal market quotations, and the two are not comparable.