Finishing a challenging season on Chilean stone fruit

Overview of stone fruit from Chile in the U.S. market, complemented by charts from Agronometrics. Original published on March 21, 2025.

As Chilean stone fruit shipments finish up, growers and shippers look back on a few challenges this season. The beginning of the Chilean stone fruit season began as usual at the end of November. That’s when the first air shipments of nectarines, apricots, and peaches took place, though plums saw a later start. “Overall, the season ended at the standard time–we only have a few pallets left to receive on peaches and plums,” says Domingo Hidalgo of Summit Produce.

Even so, the stone fruit season proved to be a condensed one with peak volumes starting to arrive in mid-January, thanks in part to the notion of a strike at the ports. “It was an early start for ocean fruit this year and the potential strike between the International Longshoremen’s Association union and the U.S. Maritime Alliance of ports that everyone thought would take place on January 15th, never happened. Chile had two weeks with sailing issues that created large arrivals through January,” says Summit Produce’s Franco Pruzzo. “That created an oversupply from January 15th until last week. There’s been a lot of fruit into the market and there was a big jump on nectarines particularly compared to a regular season.”

Most Chilean growers also looked for outlets for white nectarines and the U.S. was a viable option, particularly for the first 2/3 of the season. However, shy nectarine demand in China, which is the main destination for this item, meant +60 percent YOY of that fruit came to the U.S. which in turn impacted the normal demand on yellow nectarines. Nectarines generally saw an overall greater supply with some 3 million boxes compared to last year’s 2.2 million boxes.

Something that caught the company’s attention this year was the lack of retail floor space in the stone fruit segment. ”We understand that this item typically does not occupy a large amount of real estate in the produce section, although we believe that this year, it seemed to be less than average. This came with higher than average pricing, $2.99 to $3.49,” says Pruzzo. This strategy didn’t help the movement that growers and shippers needed to push the heavy and condensed volume that arrived this season.

Source: USDA Market News via Agronometrics.
(Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here)

Demand for plums steady

Another challenging factor this season was the fumigation issues on plums. “This year suddenly the systems approach was for just very few regions and growers. Roughly 85 percent of the plums that ship to the United States had to be fumigated and that affected the shelf life of the fruit and the movement,” says Pruzzo, adding that last year Chile shipped 1.6 million boxes of plums and this year it shipped 1.8 million boxes of plums YTD.

The News in Charts is a collection of stories from the industry complemented by charts from Agronometrics to help better tell their story.

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