Why have tomato prices surged nearly 40% in a year?

Tomatoes are the latest fashionable nutrient to instrumentality a wound retired of user wallets, joining items like coffee, bananas and beef.

As of April, authorities information shows the fruit's prices were up astir 40% from a twelvemonth ago, compared with 17% for nutrient costs overall. Across the U.S., tomatoes outgo an mean of $2.69 a pound, a grounds high, according to Federal Reserve figures. 

By comparison, java prices successful April had risen 18.5% from the trailing 12 months, crushed beef had jumped 19% and seafood was up 12%, labour information shows.

Several factors are driving up herb prices, David Branch, assemblage manager astatine the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, told CBS News. The U.S. successful July imposed a 17% tariff connected Mexican tomatoes aft withdrawing from a three-decade-old commercialized statement that enabled duty-free herb imports from Mexico. Although scuttling the woody benefited American farmers, consumers are feeling the pain.

U.S. tariffs collected connected tomatoes person surged from conscionable $16,424 successful 2024 to astir $4.6 million, according to national data. In 2025, astir 90% of U.S. herb imports came from Mexico, Branch noted.

"Because the U.S. relies connected Mexico for the bulk of its herb supply, immoderate changes successful commercialized argumentation tin person a ample impact," added Brett Massimino, a Virginia Commonwealth University concern professor.

Bad upwind and illness are besides indirectly pushing up herb prices by hurting accumulation successful Mexico and Florida, reducing supplies.

"What's making it unsocial is the information that determination is simply a shortage of tomatoes and determination isn't a shortage of different produce," said Phillip Coles, a prof of proviso concatenation absorption astatine Lehigh University. 

Food manufacture expert Phil Lempert, known arsenic the SupermarketGuru, besides said the Iran war is fueling higher herb costs done higher lipid prices. "Because of the Iran war, the terms of transporting tomatoes is much expensive."

Tomatoes are typically shipped connected refrigerated trucks that necessitate much diesel to powerfulness some the vehicles and the refrigerators lodging the tomatoes, helium noted.

"When you person a large emergence successful a halfway outgo component, it winds up having a large interaction successful the end," Massimino told CBS News. "It's a weird concern that each these things are coming unneurotic astatine once."

Edited by Alain Sherter

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

In:

• Consumer Price Index