Prices of beetroot have slightly increased.
The market for beetroot in Poland is finishing the early period of the campaign and entering the main phase. Usually, entering this phase signifies the beginning of a clear upward trend in the current supply of beetroots in the market. Depending on the season, this phase usually extends until November – December.
However, this is not always the case. There are years when unfavorable weather significantly disrupts this cycle. It delays the start of the period of increased supply, shortens it, etc. An extreme example of this was the 2022/2023 season when beetroot prices, instead of decreasing, started rising from the second half of August until October. And even then, they didn't decrease much. Interestingly, this happened in a season where the harvest was not significantly lower.
source: own elaboration based on GUS data
As seen in our chart, this year's initial GUS forecast indicates beetroot harvest to be slightly lower year on year, but not by much (-1.6 percent). Therefore, they will not differ significantly from the harvest of the last three years.
Yet, in the current season, on the verge of this main phase where theoretically the supply should be significantly increasing, instead of further pressure for a decrease in wholesale beetroot prices, we have seen an increase in these prices. By the end of July, after an average decrease of 20 percent, selling prices for beetroots (washed and bagged) in large wholesale stabilized at around 0.90 PLN/kg (0.21 EUR/kg) on average.
The beginning of August brought another correction to 0.85 PLN/kg (0.20 EUR/kg) (range 0.70-1.00 PLN/kg, or 0.16-0.23 EUR/kg), but then the prices of these beetroots strengthened, and now they are mostly in the range of 0.80-1.10 PLN/kg (0.19-0.26 EUR/kg), which is 12 percent higher than the minimum. Of course, this is still significantly less than last year's prices at 1.25 PLN/kg (0.29 EUR/kg) on average, but the current average of 0.95 PLN/kg (0.22 EUR/kg) is higher than all other quotations from a similar period in the previous several years at least.