Wholesale prices
How much do tomatoes cost wholesale?
Fresh tomatoes are the most seasonal, most regional and most weather-exposed item on this list — a price that held for a month can double after one cold night in a growing region. Nobody can quote you a year-round wholesale price honestly. What travels is the vocabulary: grade, size count and colour stage.
What this page is and is not
We do not have wholesale quote data. Nobody publishes a national wholesale price for tomatoes that would mean anything on your invoice, and we are not going to invent one. The figure below is a retail-level US city average from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the same series behind our food cost index. Use it as a direction and a sanity check, never as a quote. The rest of this page is the part that is actually worth your time: how to read the quote you already have.
Where the tracked number sits
September 2026 · retail, US city average
$2.00
per lb
- 3 months
- −25.5%
- 12 months
- +11.7%
Your delivered price will not be this number. It will be a different number, in a different pack, at a different point in the chain, in your region — and that is fine, because the useful question is not does my price match a national average. It is did my price move the way the market moved. A quote that rose in a quarter when the tracked series fell −25.5% is a conversation you can have with evidence in your hand.
For what the last twelve months did to specific dishes, the tomatoes price page runs the per-plate arithmetic off this same series.
The packs you are actually quoted on
A quote arrives as a case price. Nothing is comparable until it is converted — to another vendor, to last quarter, or to the series above. The right-hand column is that conversion done at the retail-level average, so it is a reference point with the arithmetic shown, not a price anyone should expect to pay.
| Pack | In tracked units | At the retail-level average |
|---|---|---|
Carton — 25 lb, round / slicing The standard fresh pack, quoted with a size count (5×6, 6×6) that tells you how the fruit is arranged in the carton — and therefore how big it is. | 25 × lb | $50.08 |
Carton — 20 lb, Roma A different product for a different job. Denser, less water, made for sauce and for salads that have to hold. | 20 × lb | $40.06 |
Canned — 6 × #10, crushed or whole peeled Does not convert to a fresh price and should not be compared with one. Canned is a separate market with its own contract season, and for most sauce applications it is the correct product regardless of what fresh is doing. | — | not comparable |
What drives the spread
Four things separate any published average from the number on your invoice. Knowing which one a rep is moving is most of the skill.
Volume
The weakest volume lever on this page. A carton is a carton, and the price is set by whatever is happening in the growing region this week — you cannot negotiate weather.
Region
The dominant factor, and it moves through the year as production shifts between growing regions and imports. Freight on a 25 lb carton of a fragile, temperature-sensitive product is a large share of the delivered price, and a long haul also costs you shelf life at the other end.
Grade & spec
US No. 1 or No. 2; size count (a larger count number means smaller fruit); colour stage, from breaker through full red — a carton bought at stage 5 has days on it and a carton at stage 2 has a week; and field-grown versus hothouse or vine-ripe, which are genuinely different products at genuinely different prices.
Vendor
A produce specialist against a broadline. On produce the specialist's advantage is not usually the price — it is that they will tell you what the market is doing this week and let you switch spec before the price arrives.
The public benchmark
USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Specialty Crops publishes terminal market and shipping point reports for tomatoes by type, size and origin — the closest thing to a public wholesale price that exists for fresh produce: ams.usda.gov/market-news.
We name these rather than restate them. A market level quoted from memory is a fabricated statistic, and the point of a public benchmark is that you can go and read today's.
What to ask for
- Grade, size count and colour stage on the quote. All three, every time — the first two set the price and the third sets how long you have.
- Origin, and whether it is field-grown, hothouse or vine-ripe.
- Delivered price per carton and the carton weight.
How to tell whether your quote is reasonable
- 1Carton ÷ weight = $/lb, then work out slices per fruit at your size count. A sandwich menu is costed per slice, and a bigger fruit yields more usable slices per pound because the ends are a fixed loss on every tomato regardless of size.
- 2Read the colour stage as a price. A cheaper carton at a riper stage is not cheaper if a third of it goes over before service uses it — count that as shrink, not as a discount.
- 3Ask what next week looks like. On produce, the useful thing a good vendor sells you is warning. The tomatoes price page gives you the retail-level trend to hold that conversation against.
Red flags
- A flat annual price on fresh tomatoes. Somebody is pricing in the risk and it is not the person offering it.
- Grade or size count absent from the quote, which makes two "tomato" prices uncomparable.
- A fresh price compared against a canned price. Different products, different markets, different dishes.
Terms on this page
Edible portion vs. as-purchased
AP is what you paid the supplier; EP is what the usable part actually costs after loss.
Yield percentage
The share of a purchased ingredient that survives trimming, peeling and cooking to reach the plate.
Price creep
Small, frequent supplier price increases that individually look ignorable and collectively remove several points of margin a year.
A good quote still gets worse without anyone deciding to.
The negotiation is the easy part. What costs money is the eleven months afterwards, when the case weight drifts, the lean point changes, the slice count moves and every recipe built on the old number keeps quietly reporting the old cost. Marji reads the invoice, recosts every dish the ingredient touches, and tells you which menu price stopped working.
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