Vidalia onions winding down even season

For Vidalia onions, it’s been a pretty uneventful season. “It’s been a good season with very little quality issues. It’s been kind of a steady go all season and the movement of Vidalias has been good,” says Mike Downey of Military Produce Group LLC in Norfolk, Va.

Downey says the season is winding down for domestically-available Vidalias. “We’ve heard it will probably go until the end of this month and then they’ll go offshore to Peru and other Central/South American countries. It’s definitely a tightening supply right now. But that’s normal for this time of year. Things usually wrap up around the middle to end of August.”

This year, the Vidalia onion season began April 20th. “There weren’t any problems with the timing of the season,” says Downey. “And that isn’t the situation we’ve seen with other products. The weather in the south has been very rainy and a lot of other commodities are problematic.”

With demand being steady for Vidalias, pricing has been even. “I don’t think the growers are making a ton of money but it’s about where it normally is,” says Downey.

Looking ahead, Downey says Military is winding down its work on Vidalias. “We’re not doing any promotions or anything like that towards the end of the season because the quality can fall off pretty quickly,” he says, noting that the transition to Peru-sourced sweet onions tends to be pretty smooth. “The price jumps a little bit because of the cost of bringing it in from overseas, but that’s usually the only hiccup,” he says.