Americans spend almost $7 million on chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine’s Day, creating a bump in demand for the fruit during the otherwise slow off-season, Nielsen data show.
The strawberry’s red colour and heart shape has long made it a favourite for romantics, and folklore associates the fruit with Venus, the Roman goddess of love, according to the University of Illinois Extension website.
Increased supplies means it’s easier to find bigger, juicier strawberries this year, said Tariq Farid, the chief executive officer of Wallingford, Connecticut-based Edible Arrangements International. The company’s 1,200 franchises sell more than 700,000 pounds (318,000 kilograms) of strawberries, primarily dipped in chocolate, for the holiday, its biggest sales day of the year.
“It’ll be a great strawberry Valentine’s Day,” Farid said in a telephone interview. “As the price declines, the quality gets better, and you’re not shy about putting them up front and selling a ton of them.”
Strawberry prices dropped 28 per cent in the seven weeks through 6 February, data from the US Department of Agriculture show. That’s the biggest slide leading into the holiday celebrated on 14 February since 2012. The fruit costs about 1 per cent less than it did at this time in 2014.
Warmer-than-usual weather in parts of California, which supplies about 80 per cent of US fresh strawberries, stressed plants in 2014, said Vince Lopes, the Salinas, California-based vice president of West Coast sales at Naturipe Farms LLC. American production last year fell almost 1 per cent from 2013.
“We had record warm nights, that have never really happened before,” Lopes said by telephone. “It created a lot of stress on the plants. It caused their peak growing cycles to peak early. That’s a rare phenomenon.”
With some California production peaking early, prices climbed in the fourth quarter amid a longer-than-normal gap between supplies from the region and those coming from Florida and other southern growing areas. Now, production has ramped up in the south-eastern state, which grows most of the fruit during this time of year, according to Agnes Perez, an agricultural economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service in Washington.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
