Market Update

Market Snapshot*

The U.S. Department of Agriculture was reporting the following prices on 24-inch bins of watermelons from Texas:

Seeded: 35-count, mostly 18 cents per pound; 45-count, mostly 16 cents per pound.

Seedless: 35-count, mostly 18 cents per pound; 45-count, mostly 18 cents per pound; 60-count, mostly 16 cents per pound.

* Prices from the USDA's Fruit & Vegetable Market News, June 30, 2008.

The Shipping Scene

Buyers who tried to source watermelons out of Texas this week probably had a tough go of it because of heavy demand for the July Fourth holiday. The task likely won't be as challenging next week as demand tapers off.

Indeed, grower-shippers hope retailers will continue to take advantage of consumers' cravings for the fruit as the warm weather continues throughout July - National Watermelon Month.

Wiggins Wholesale Inc., Snook, Texas, started shipping watermelons in early May and will continue until late October, said James Wiggins, partner.

The company starts in the Rio Grande Valley, transitions to Snook from mid-June to Aug. 1 and finishes out the season in Seminole.

"We've got excellent quality this year," Wiggins said. "It's beautiful fruit."

Consumers like a watermelon that is dense, consistent, "and is not mushy," he said.

There was a good selection of sizes available from Wiggins Wholesale, including 20-, 28-, 30-, 36-, 45- and 60-count bins.

The family operation has 2,000 acres of melons and will ship about 2,500 loads of seedless melons, which account for about 90% of the company's watermelon volume.

Demand leading up to the Fourth of July has been so heavy that Wiggins said he probably could move 15 more loads per day.

"If I had 50 loads a day, I could sell them," he said late last week.

Nat Coleman, owner of Nat Coleman Produce in Palestine, Texas, agreed that availability of Texas watermelons has been tight.

A lot of supermarkets have Texas watermelons on ad this week, he said. "I think there are some orders that aren't going to be filled."

Quality has been good for the most part, he said. But even growers with less-than-perfect melons have been able to sell them because of the heavy demand.

Volume at Coleman Produce is down a bit this year because of heavy winds early in the season and no rain to speak of for the past 90 days.

"The crops didn't set the fruit like they should have," Coleman said.

"It's dry - real dry," through east Texas and southward, he said.

Some growers planted dryland crops hoping that enough rain would come along to water their melons, "which didn't happen," he said.

Nonetheless, most buyers likely were able to find enough melons to fill their holiday needs, even if it meant going outside of Texas to Florida, Georgia or Mississippi, he said.

Transporting those melons was another matter.

"It's hard to get trucks," Coleman said.

Finding smaller sizes was a challenge, as well. Most chains were looking for 60-count seedless varieties that they could feature for a relatively low price. Size 36s and 45s were more readily available, he said.

Kevin green, salesman for Jackson Melons Inc. in Henderson, said he wasn't sure what demand will be like after the Fourth.

"That's the million-dollar question," he said.

Demand and markets were strong for the holiday, he said, and volume was up considerably from last year, when floods and bad weather wiped out much of the crop.

"It was pure disaster," he said.

This season, volume is back to normal, he said, "and quality has been nice all year."

Jackson Melons now is loading out of east and central Texas and will transition to West Texas in two or three weeks.

The company ships mostly seeded watermelons, but still does a lot of seeded business in Texas, Louisiana and the Midwest.

The Fourth of July is the biggest watermelon holiday of the year, confirmed Gordon Hunt, marketing director for the National Watermelon Promotion Board in Orlando, Fla. Texas ranks among the top three or four watermelon-producing states.

Nationwide, the industry will ship the equivalent of nearly 40 million 16-pound watermelons during the two weeks leading up to July 4, said Jason Hanselman, the board's industry affairs associate.

But Hunt said he'd like to see retailers promote watermelons throughout the summer.

The board is planning a satellite media tour in July for Katie Brown, host of the Public Broadcasting Service's "The Katie Brown Workshop." Brown will show consumers how to plan "staycations" this summer and have fun without leaving their own back yards.

(By Tom Burfield, Western correspondent for The Packer. The Packer and Red Book Credit Services are part of food360º, a division of Vance Publishing Corp., Lincolnshire, Ill.)