Dragon Fruit Premium Prices

Dragon Fruit Premium Prices

Maura Bennett
Maura Bennett

Delays from other nations and domestic weather could see southeast Dragon Fruit crops fetching a higher price than usual.

Jose Roggiero of Florida’s Freshway Produce, Inc. told Fresh Plaza that supplies of the white and yellow dragon fruits are short this season. Those varieties are coming from Ecuador which is seeing production delays.

Roggiero told the publication that Florida production is also running slightly late this season. That’s due to a lack of rain. He says a low volume of red dragon fruit may start coming online towards the end of this month and go to November. Then white dragon fruit may start in Florida sometime around the 4th of July.

Dragon Fruit varieties are grown by the Tropical Fruit Growers of South Florida which produced a video explaining its popularity.

“Dragon Fruit is also known as Pitaya and Pitaya is from the hot arid regions of Central America. Pitaya or Dragon Fruit can grow in all the tropical and subtropical regions of the world and in South Florida Dragon Fruit is a fruit that grows on this vine-like cactus. It flowers at night and the flowers give off this really nice sweet aromatic smell. It’s pollinated at night by bats and moths and bees in the morning.”

Toward the end of February and all of March, prices were low because there was an oversupply, now that has changed according to the produce supplier. Florida growers also planted less dragon fruit in part due to disease.

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