What moves price
Yellow, red, white, sweet: how variety moves onion price
Yellow onions are the workhorse, about 87 percent of US production, so they carry the volume and set the reference price. Red and white are small, choppier markets that can swing harder on thin demand, and sweets trade as their own brand-driven market, which is why a red or white move often looks bigger than a yellow one.
Updated Jul 10, 2026
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Onion variety moves price mostly through volume, and yellow onions own the volume. Yellows are about 87 percent of US production, with reds near 8 percent and whites around 5 percent, by the National Onion Association's numbers. Sweets are a separate, brand-driven market layered on top. The size of each market is what makes their prices behave differently.
Yellow is the workhorse
The yellow onion is the reference. It is the storage crop, the foodservice staple and the bag in most kitchens, and its sheer volume makes its price the anchor the rest of the market is read against. When people talk about "the onion market," they are mostly talking about yellows. Deep supply and steady demand make yellow pricing the least jumpy of the four, which is exactly why it is the baseline. A yellow move is a real market move, not a thin-market wobble.
Red and white are smaller and choppier
Reds and whites are a fraction of the volume, and thinner markets move harder. Red demand concentrates in foodservice and in specific cuisines, white in others, so a shift in a narrow slice of buyers, or a single origin coming up short, can swing a red or white price more sharply than the same event would move yellows. A red premium over yellow can widen and narrow faster than anything on the yellow side. Read a big red or white percentage move with that thinness in mind: it can be genuine tightness, or it can be a small market reacting to a small change.
Sweets are their own market
Sweet onions trade on brand and season, not on the storage-onion supply. A Vidalia or a Walla Walla or a Texas 1015 is priced against its own limited window and its own demand, and because sweets do not store, they never sit in the yellow inventory pool. A sweet price says nothing reliable about where yellows are, and the reverse. Keep them mentally separate.
Compare the varieties on the data
The yellow table above is the volume market, the baseline. Set the red, white and sweet variety pages beside it and the pattern shows: yellows deep and relatively steady, reds and whites thinner and more prone to sharp moves, sweets marching to their own seasonal drum. The variety a lot is packed as is one of the fields that sets its price, right alongside origin, size and pack.
Know Your Onions reports each variety's prices as USDA publishes them and does not forecast which way a variety will move.