End of the industrial raspberry purchase season 2024

The raspberry purchasing campaign for processing in 2023 has definitively entered its final phase. Only a few entities are still interested in acquiring these fruits for processing. Most likely, within the next few days, this activity will completely cease, although there have been seasons in the past where processors were still interested in raspberries even in the second half of October.

How can we summarize this year's raspberry purchasing season in Poland? An analysis of the average price curve clearly shows that Polish raspberries remained under strong pressure to lower prices throughout the entire campaign. The beginning of the season and the purchase of summer raspberries brought better prices. Then it got worse. Only towards the end of this year's campaign did the average prices improve slightly. Currently, prices are at 7.00-9.00 PLN/kg for both raspberries for freezing and lower-quality fruits.

Of course, one could say that these prices are better than last year (almost twice as good), but evaluating solely based on that statement would be incomplete. Firstly, last year was catastrophic for Polish raspberry producers. We had a collapse in purchase prices in the industry, so prices better than those from last year mean little.

Comparing current purchasing prices with those over the past few years, we see that we had two better seasons. The record-breaking year in 2021 and the campaign in 2022. Although now, in October, the current average is higher than that from the same period two years ago, it does not change the overall picture - in 2022, prices were significantly higher for 90 percent of the time than in the current season.

In summary - from the price comparison alone, it is evident that the 2024 season, although more favorable for Polish raspberry producers than the previous year, was far from what they would consider a good campaign. With very poor yields, in difficult weather conditions, and with a significant increase in production costs, prices still did not even come close to the levels of 2021. The sword of Damocles in the form of cheap fruit imports still hangs over Polish raspberries - both fresh and frozen, from countries like Serbia and especially Ukraine.