Dive Brief:
- Early indications are that the apple crop from Washington State could reach 140 million to 150 million boxes, well above the record 128.8 million boxes harvested in 2012.
- Crop figures from Michigan and New York, the other large growing areas in the U.S., indicate a smaller crop than last year.
- Should the weather hold, the total crop appears poised to be the third-largest in history -- which would likely push prices downward during autumn.
Dive Insight:
Predicting crop output is as much art as science, and there's always the possibility that something will happen outside the carefully calculated spreadsheets to render those projections worthless.
Back in 2012, for example, things also looked great for the crop. And they continued to look great right up until hail storms hit and wiped out some 15 million boxes of fruit.