Gold Pineapple

COSTA RICA

The beautiful golden pineapple from Costa Rica, is more golden than ever!

The challenges of the supply chain from covid still linger for crop inputs, with prices for many nutrition components increasing 7 -10 times from what is was just a year before. We have seen some great farms run severely short on their sales commitments as they weren’t able to get enough crop protection to produce large fruit of export quality so far during the first quarter of 2023. Total acreage production numbers are similar or slightly higher than the previous 3 year average, but the exported volumes haven’t matched as many farms dropped in yields and quality.

The demand in the US has remained strong through the last 3 months, and we didn’t experience a dip over the holidays and end of year. We feel fortunate to have had extra production to support some new and previous customers when their other suppliers couldn’t deliver.

In general, crowned pineapple production should meet market demand for the coming months, and crownless pineapple with clean internal quality is forecasted to be short for the global market. We at Stella Farms, remain committed to our customers and have made the crop investments to maintain quality production to cover our customer needs.

MEXICO

Pineapple imports into the U.S. will continue to be very light as the main production area in Veracruz State continues to deal with the annual NDF period in that growing zone.  This time of year, quality control is extremely challenging as minimal brix levels of 13 tend to be very difficult to achieve due to the extreme growing conditions.  The good news is that all of our farms are indicating that quality will start to improve the beginning of September and by October we should see strong production numbers and very good quality.  This will allow for promotions during the important Fall holiday time periods and the sizing curve will see bigger sizes than what we’re expecting out of Costa Rica.