Why are blueberries so cheap?
What piles of fresh blueberries in New Jersey in January dispel about several tired ag truisms.
Everyone and their brother is talking about expensive eggs, and eggs are (justifiably - bird flu is real, folks) either eye-poppingly expensive or increasingly simply absent on grocery store shelves across America. You can read more about the issue here, here, and here, but I’m here to talk about something else with a price tag that made me do a double take in the grocery store this month: blueberries.
Blueberries were front and center at my grocery store in New Jersey this month - promotion of all promotions. After trekking through the frozen, and alternately salty and icy parking lot, the prime display case that greeted customers was filled with blueberries. Not just any blueberries either. Stacked high and crowned with a $2.50/each sign, these fresh organic blueberries were clearly in abundant supply.
My kids, both instantly turned to ask if we could buy some. They have heard my speeches on air freight and imports, and knew my general rule on fruit in January is citrus. Tangerines, navels, cara caras, minneolas, blood oranges, grapefruit, pommelos - knock yourselves out kids. There are plenty of fresh fruit options grown in CA (or TX or FL) that meet all our nutritional needs and can get here on a train or truck. As a rule we do not buy summer fruit - stonefruit or melons or berries - in January because a) they do not taste as good, and b) the emissions associated with bringing them here from Central or South America are ridiculous. Cheap imports are also decimating domestic production - now more than 60% of America’s fruit is imported - something that I worry may not be the best for a lot of reasons. Increasingly, these imports are not just providing counter seasonal access to fresh produce but displacing domestic processed produce as well. Frozen, jarred, jammed, canned, or dried most of the raw ingredients now also come from crops grown abroad.
But my kids also know me and this promotional pile of berries had some things going for it. They wasted no time in building their cases. “But mom, look, they’re organic!” “Mom, this price per serving is basically as cheap as tangerines - they’re actually cheaper than the organic tangerines!” “Mom, look, they’re not wrinkly or moldy or squished - AND look how BIG they are!”
I had to admit these berries did look fresh and high quality and the price was extremely hard to argue with. Knowing I was about to go stare down some $12 eggs, relented and let them pile several clamshells of these berries into the cart. I peered at the labels and noted these fresh-looking berries hailed all the way from the west coast of South America - Peru. More and more of the produce in my grocery store seems to hail from Peru for more and more of the year, so I decided to dig into why.
Peruvian blueberry production has exploded over the last decade. Ten years ago, 2015, was the first year Peru had any recorded blueberry production reported to FAO. By 2018, they were the world’s leading exporter of blueberries. They have held that position for the last 5 consecutive years with little competition since. With yields 2.5-3x higher than those in the US, 2024/25 blueberry production in Peru is expected to make Peru the #1 blueberry producer in the world.
Blueberry production has grown exponentially in Peru. This dataset ends in 2022, but exports alone (nearly all production is exported) are projected to reach ~324,000 tonnes this season, more than 30,000 tonnes more than were produced just 2 years ago. [1]
How did they do this? And what has Peru’s rapid ascent in the blueberry industry meant for US blueberry producers?
For one, they created new agricultural land.
Wait, what? Isn’t that the whole reason why farmland is such a good investment? There’s a whole terrible country song where Jordan Davis and Luke Bryan croon about, “You can buy dirt
And thank the good Lord for it 'Cause He ain't makin' any more of it So buy dirt.”
Turns out maybe He isn’t, but the government of Peru sure is.
As an article that came out earlier this month explained, “the government made large investments in irrigation projects to divert and efficiently distribute river water, which created new agricultural land in some previously arid places. La Libertad and Lambayeque are the areas where the most important irrigation projects were implemented, providing these areas with new agricultural land and cheap water access.”
These aren’t small projects. The Peruvian government has been investing billions of USD in at least 7 large irrigation projects. One, the Limón Dam, part of the Olmos Transandino Project, is so massive it was literally featured on a Discovery Channel show called “Build it Bigger.” It was built between 2006 and 2009 and features a 12-mile trans-Andean tunnel to move water from the Atlantic side of the mountains to the Pacific side.
Government investments in irrigation projects to convert arid desert land into blueberry and other agricultural land is certainly part of how Peru became the blueberry producing capital of the world.
But, land and water alone does not make a massive new industry bloom. Labor, technology, trade policy, and prices also had parts to play.
Labor is a challenge in agricultural production the world over, but is particularly problematic in fresh produce where product quality and value depends on careful, gentle, timely harvesting, usually by hand. Peruvian producers solved this problem too… with rural women previously working outside the formal economy.
As a recent article explained, blueberry picking “needs to be performed with special care to not damage the fruit. This particular set of skills required from blueberry laborers… has led the industry to hire more women than any other agricultural sector in the country.” I was going to say something about gender or “unskilled” agricultural labor actually being quite skilled, but I’ll just leave this quote here with no comment.
Regardless, the industry found a pool of qualified and effective workers to harvest their blueberries in the desert. The government also found some ROI on their irrigation investment as the article further explained that ~75% of the population in the regions had previously worked in the informal economy, which “are costly for the government as workers do not pay income taxes.”
I wonder whether the women working these jobs find their lives better for them, but they do at least pay decently, relative to the Peruvian minimum wage. The article reported blueberry industry jobs pay 50% more than the minimum wage and a new wage law that went into effect in Peru on December 28, 2024 mandates a 30% bonus for agricultural workers above the new elevated national minimum wage. Quite the contrast with wage laws in the US where states often exclude or offer lower minimum wages for agricultural workers.
But, that’s not the only contrast with US wage laws.
Up until this month, the minimum monthly wage in Peru was $274.96 per month. Even if they are paying 50% above that, the monthly wage for a blueberry worker in Peru would amount to ~$400/month. In contrast, the minimum wage in the top US blueberry producing state, Washington, is $16.66/ hr or ~$2,800/month, assuming 40-hour work weeks and no overtime.
That’s 10x the minimum wage in Peru.
Add in the consideration that growing blueberries in the desert alleviates pressure from all those pesky pests and disease problems that make blueberry yields in the US just 30-50% of Peruvian yields, and you can start to see why it might be MUCH more profitable to produce blueberries in Peru. It’s not just that the hourly or monthly cost of labor is 10% the cost of labor in the US, the harvesting time/labor efficiency is also much better in Peru.
Thanks to an absence of native pests and rain, Peru has the highest blueberry yields per hectare in the world, ~3x US yields in non-El Nino years and 2x US yields even in the blistering heat of El Nino. [1]
But, wait! What about getting them to the consumers? How can you possibly have nice, plump, fresh-looking blueberries grown in Peru sitting on New Jersey grocery store shelves?
Enter the magic (or really the science) of refrigerated, controlled atmosphere containers. Refrigerated containers first came on the scene in the late 1950s, making long distance transport of perishable goods possible. But, to make it feasible to move produce long distances, and have it arrive with any remaining quality or shelf life controlled atmosphere technology, whereby carbon dioxide is pumped out and usually an inert gas like N2 is pumped into the refrigerated container is necessary. These first emerged in the 1990s, but additional advances in films and packaging materials, along with rapid post harvest cooling, have made it possible to achieve up to 3-month shelf lives on blueberries.
These technologies, along with advances in ocean vessels and new ports in Peru, in turn make it possible to move blueberries by ocean freight between Peru and Asia in as few as 26 days. According to a January 2025 report, 97% of Peruvian blueberries move by sea freight. The US is the biggest importer, buying 53% of Peruvian exports, 58% of which enter the US through the port in Philadelphia. Sea freight has up to 98% lower emissions than air freight per kilometer, so I guess I can enjoy my Peruvian blueberries without emissions guilt too.
So, where are we on why blueberries are so cheap?
Peru converted a desert to the highest yielding blueberry producing region in the world by investing in some massive irrigation projects, including one that moves water from one side of the Andes to the other.
The desert climate lacks pest and disease pressure, which makes Peruvian blueberry yields 2-3x higher than those in the US.
Labor costs less than 10% as much there as it does in the US.
Technology has made it possible to prevent blueberry decay/maintain marketable quality for up to 3 months, which allows sufficient time to move blueberries by sea freight to China, the US, and even the Netherlands.
Beyond these physical and economic reasons, Peruvian producers also benefited from favorable changes to trade policy and seasonal price premiums that further enhanced profitability. The US and Peru signed a free trade agreement that went into effect on February 1, 2009, which removed tariffs on agricultural products, which spurred much of the Peruvian government’s investment in export-oriented agricultural development. While Peru’s increasingly focusing on China to grow their market, it was initially access to the US market that fueled this boom. And, when Peruvian blueberries first showed up on US shelves, they benefited from high pricing related to historically seasonally-limited supplies.
How does this net out for US blueberry growers? Are Peruvian berries simply filling a complementary niche in the market?
My blueberry plants are currently half buried in snow and as dormant as dormant can be, so my fellow northern hemisphere dwellers may share a similar thought - this is all win-win-win! More jobs for women in Peru, more off-season healthy, fresh produce for American consumers - what’s not to love?
Well, if you’re a US blueberry producer, particularly one that grew blueberries for the shoulder seasons (e.g. a Florida grower) or one who grew blueberries for processing (e.g. a Michigan grower), there’s quite a lot not to love.
Florida growers have seen their prices fall more than 50% in nominal terms over the last 20 years, as their berries began competing directly with Peruvian-grown blueberries. Similarly, Michigan growers have seen their prices stagnate in nominal terms and fall more than 70% when adjusting for inflation.
Nominal blueberry prices paid to US growers have been flat to declining for 20 years, but have been especcially surpressed since 2016 when Peruvian supply came to dominate the US market.
Considering other production costs, labor in particular, but also capital and inputs, have not stagnated over the last 20 years, US producers have seen their margins disappear.
Additionally, these same technologies that make it possible to move fresh blueberries to market from Peru to the US, combined with Peru’s climate that allows production for 9 months of the year with harvesting starting as early as August/September and continuing through the following May, though the season peaks in December/January. This means that these cheaper-to-produce blueberries could conceivably cover US shelves for nearly the entire year.
These dynamics have led domestic blueberry producers to seek remedy through the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), but they concluded their investigation in 2021 and found no damage.
So, Peru is why blueberries are cheap and abundant in January. Thanks to technology, they’re mostly getting here by boat, which is not a nightmare from an emissions standpoint, but does fundamentally alter the disruption risks related to blueberries.
What disruption risks? Isn’t moving production to a pest-free utopia in Peru good for everyone except maybe the US blueberry farmer?
Perhaps, but there are still a few pieces of this global reshuffling that give me pause, namely, consolidation and control. While there are many firms - at least 300 according to one report - producing blueberries in Peru, the high yields mean production is much, much, much more consolidated in terms to spatial extent compared to production in the US for example. And the area upon which all these Peruvian blueberries are grown is a narrow strip of desert next to the Pacific Ocean subject to relatively regular El Nino related extremes. The first major El Nino to impact Peru’s nascent blueberry industry came in the 23/24 year and caused heatwaves that depressed production more than 25%. But, beyond the growing, all these blueberries need to move on a handful of roads and out of and into just a couple of ports to make it to US consumers. Compare this supply chain with these extreme pinch points to the prior domestic blueberry supply chain where production is distributed across thousands of farms in more than a dozen states. The risk of disruption to the entire Peruvian supply from a fire, other extreme physical event, or port strike or other geopolitical related port access issue is far greater than for thousands of farms across dozens of US states and all the roads between them and consumers to be simultaneouly impacted by natural (or social) disasters (though the social disaster of immigration issues is shaping up to be a solid test).
More than half of all Peruvian blueberry production occurs in a single department (Peruvian equivalent of a province/state) and then primarily exits through a single port. More than half of US imports also enter through a single port - Philadelphia.
In other instances where we have seen production largely off-shored to a single other region of another country, like orange juice moving from Florida to Brazil, this all eggs in one production basket has come back to bite us. Brazil, which now produces 73% of global orange juice, experienced a drought in their orange juice growing region and global orange juice prices spiked to 5x their 2020 levels. So, the American consumer may find themselves paying for these cheap blueberries several times over in future years. Not a risk I feel great about.
US orance juice production has fallen more than 90%, being largely replaces by orange juice grown and produced in a single region of Brazil. When that region was hit with a drought, global orange juice prices spiked 5x.
Finally, there is the issue of what this blueberry industry in Peru displaced. To read the “More Land, More Labor, More Berries to Savor” article it would seem that the industry was a savior for rural women of Peru. Maybe this is true. But, another article that ran in December 2024 painted a less rosy picture. Quoting blueberry picker Julisa Gonzales, who works at the largest blueberry exporter, Camposol, “while the companies continue to grow, we’re exploited on minimum wage [$275 per month],” this article asserted the living conditions of blueberry harvesters haven’t kept pace with the industry’s success, nor are the companies paying pickers 50% more than minimum wage. Other articles raise issues around indigenous land rights and displacement and environmental consequences of these massive dams and water projects.
Collectively, these issues still give me some pause around picking up those cheap, organic, Peruvian blueberries in January, though admittedly my $2.50 decision means little to this multi-billion dollar industry. But, why I might pick up those January blueberries is, I think, illuminating for why American blueberry consumption has increased 10-fold, from 0.26 lb per person per year to 2.54 lbs per person per year in 2021. I picked up those blueberries and ate them because they were there. Consumption has increased because the supply exists thanks to a 10-fold increase in imports.
Given that Americans are supposed to eat 0.75-1 lb of fruit per DAY, these 2.54 lbs of blueberries per YEAR are not a game changer for American nutrition. In fact, I’d go as far to say they’re really kind of meaningless from a nutritional standpoint.
In conclusion, tired ag truisms smashed by our blueberry case study include:
Ag land is an inherently limited resource. It’s not. The government can make some new ag land with a couple infrastructure projects that they then make back in income taxes.
Global agricultural trade creates well paying jobs in low- and middle-income countries. It doesn’t. Ag creates minimum wage jobs. But local wages in low- and middle- income countries can substantially lower the cost of production.
Global agricultural trade increases food access across the world. In this case, access to cheap blueberries increased in high-income countries, mostly the US and EU so far, but not in a way that meaningfully impacts their nutrition, not even of US consumers.
To most succinctly answer our original question - why are blueberries so cheap - cheap labor. The US has outsourced its supply to a region where wages are 10% or less of those here. Since labor is 50-70% of blueberry production costs, Peruvian producers are able to bring berries to market at a significantly cheaper cost while achieving significantly beter margins. Unless harvest mechanization in achieved, we may soon see US blueberries go the way of US orange juice.
Sources:
Baker MacKenzie. Peru: Minimum living wage increase. January 2, 2025. Available online: https://insightplus.bakermckenzie.com/bm/employment-compensation/peru-minimum-living-wage-increase#:~:text=On%20Friday%2C%2027%20December%202024,total%20consensus%20was%20not%20reached.
Hammami A., Guan Z., Cui X. "Foreign Competition Reshaping the Landscape of the U.S. Blueberry Market". Choices. 2024. Quarter 3. Available Online: https://www.choicesmagazine.org/choices-magazine/submitted-articles/foreign-competition-reshaping-the-landscape-of-the-us-blueberry-market
Pazos, N. and J. Janzen. "Peru’s Blueberry Boom: More Land, More Labor, More Berries to Savor." farmdoc daily (15):1, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, January 2, 2025. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/01/perus-blueberry-boom-more-land-more-labor-more-berries-to-savor.html
https://www.freshplaza.com/north-america/article/9695445/global-market-overview-blueberries/
