Sweet onion prices

Sweet is defined by flavor rather than color: low sulfur content and higher water and sugar give these onions a mild taste. The best-known sweets are Georgia's Vidalia, Washington's Walla Walla and the Texas 1015 out of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and imported sweets from Peru and Mexico fill the months the domestic crops are not shipping.

This page carries all of them. USDA files most sweet onions as yellow onions with a note saying so: Vidalia and the Peruvian crop are reported as yellow Granex marked sweet, the Mexican sweets and the Texas crop before 2025 as yellow Grano marked sweet, and Walla Walla as yellow Walla Walla Sweets. Since 2025 USDA has coded the Texas crop as a sweet variety of its own. Every one of those series is read here and left off the yellow onion page, so no quote is counted on two variety pages, and each origin page still shows its crop under the place it grows.

Taken together, the sweet crops quote all year. Since the start of 2022 at least one of them has carried a USDA shipping-point quote in every calendar month. In this site's record the relay runs from the Peruvian imports, late summer through April, to the Mexican crossings from January or February into April, Texas from March into May, Georgia from April with its busiest run from May through August and a tail into early October, and Walla Walla from June into early September. One to four of those crops quote in any given month, about two on average, so the chart above is rarely crowded and a single crop's season shows clearly.

Vidalia is a legally defined onion: federal Marketing Order 955 draws its production area in south Georgia, and each season's shipping opens on an announced pack date. Walla Walla is a summer-only crop. The mildness that sells a sweet onion is the same trait that stops it keeping. Low pungency means a storage life of weeks rather than the six to nine months a cured yellow will hold, so each crop is sold off its current harvest rather than banked as inventory. That shows in the pack: almost every sweet quote on this page is a 40-lb carton, the rigid box a thin-skinned onion needs, rather than the 50-lb sack that carries the storage trade.

The price record shows how differently the sweet crops trade. Every quote on the Walla Walla jumbo carton since 2022 has been $25.00, except 2025's $25.50, a market that barely moves inside a season. The Vidalia jumbo carton has ranged from $22.00 to $28.00 since 2022 and the Peruvian jumbo carton from $21.00 to $30.00. The two spring sweets out of south Texas swing hardest from year to year: the Texas jumbo carton ran $24.00 to $32.00 in 2022 and $17.00 to $21.00 in 2026, and the Mexican one $24.00 to $30.00 in 2024 and $15.00 to $20.00 in 2026.

Against yellow, the premium is consistent. Where the same district quotes a sweet and a plain yellow onion on the same day at the same size, which happens at the Mexican crossings and in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the sweet priced above the yellow in every one of nearly 400 matched pairs in this site's record since 2021, at about 1.7 times the yellow price per pound. Because a sweet onion serves a different use than a pungent cooking onion, it does not substitute for yellow, red or white, and its FOB runs on short harvest windows and origin branding rather than on the storage cycle that sets the rest of the board. The 40-lb carton table sets the crops side by side in the pack they all sell in, and the Georgia origin page carries the full Vidalia record.