Reference
Glossary
The terms the brief uses, defined the way the shipping-point trade says them.
- Free on Board (FOB)
- The price quoted at the shipping point, before freight to the buyer's dock. The core price this brief reports, always paired with a pack ("mostly $14.00-15.00, 50-lb sacks"), never a bare number.
- Shipping point
- The packing house or district where onions are packed and loaded, and the location an FOB price is quoted from. Distinct from a terminal market, where onions are priced after they have already shipped in.
- Mostly
- The USDA qualifier marking the price range within which most of the day's actual sales happened, narrower than the full low-high range published alongside it. We quote mostly wherever USDA publishes it, never a synthetic single number.
- US No. 1
- The USDA grade standard covering the bulk of commercial fresh-market onions: reasonably well shaped, limited external defects. Distinct from US No. 2 (lower standard) and unclassified (no grade stated). Shipping-point reports also quote ungraded lots, marked "N/A."
- Jumbo / Colossal / Medium
- Size categories by diameter, largest to smallest: super colossal and colossal are the biggest, jumbo the common large size, medium the smaller standard size. Size is distinct from pack (sack vs carton) and from grade.
- Storage crop
- Onions cured after harvest and held for sale through the fall and winter, rather than sold fresh straight off the field. Idaho-Eastern Oregon's crop is the classic example, in season roughly August through April.
- New crop
- The first onions of a district's current-season harvest reaching the market, as distinct from the tail end of the prior season's storage crop still being sold down. A new-crop transition, one district's quotes starting as another's stop, is a recurring storyline here.
- Sacks vs cartons
- Two standard wholesale pack formats. A sack is a mesh or poly bag; 50 lb is the most-quoted weight, with 25-lb sacks common too. A carton is a corrugated box, 40 lb the standard weight. The same onions carry different prices by pack, so a pack is always named alongside a price.
- Movement
- The volume of onions shipped, reported separately from price, and quoted here in 10,000-lb units the way USDA publishes it. Movement rising while price falls (or the reverse) is a real supply and demand signal, not noise to ignore.
- Terminal market vs shipping point
- A terminal market is a wholesale market in a consuming city, pricing onions already shipped in. Shipping point is the origin district where the onions were packed and loaded. Terminal prices run higher than shipping-point FOB prices, reflecting freight and handling.
- F.O.B. vs delivered
- An FOB price excludes freight from the shipping point to the buyer. A delivered price includes it. This brief reports FOB (shipping-point) prices unless a page explicitly says delivered.