For the past several weeks, I have not seen it at my local grocery stores; I don’t really have a regular store and simply stop in at whatever store I happen to be driving by while running errands. I finally did find some today, in a display of 3 or 4 medium-sized heads in the organic section, and not that outrageously priced.
I asked the cashier if there was a crop failure (I didn’t see anyone in the produce section while I was there) and she hadn’t heard, or noticed that people weren’t buying heads of cauliflower, which I do semi-regularly. I didn’t see anything online about it, either.
So, any other cauliflower lovers experiencing this?
I haven’t looked for cauliflower specifically, but there is a notice posted in my usual grocery store that due to an unusually wet season in their supplier’s growing region, broccoli selections would probably be fairly limited.
Availability of fresh produce is usually seasonal, and can often be affected by the weather, amount of rainfall, pests destroying crops, big suppliers going out of business, etc.
That’s why the prices of fresh produce fluctuate a lot.
A cashier in a store will know nothing! The person who does the ordering for the store may know. Any large wholesale produce supplier in the area, who supplies the retailers, will certainly know.
Meanwhile, our local farm market has amazing heads of cabbage. We’ve been having cabbage dishes (soup, haluski, colcannon, stuffed cabbage , etc) to take advantage of this.
I don’t know what a good price for cauliflower is, but when I’ve seen it in NEPA, it’s been close to $5 a head. And not very large heads, either. Found a sale last week for $2.99 a head. Since it was payday, it looked like a decent deal.
The last time I tried to get some cauliflower was a little over a month ago, and Aldi didn’t have any. Fortunately, though, Mom had most of a head left over from something that she let me have. I imagine I could have found some somewhere if I had shopped around (if nothing else, I’m certain the West Side Market would have had it), but I very seldom go anywhere but Aldi for groceries.
Most of the AZ and CA cauliflower, broccoli and iceberg crop was lost to the Jan/Feb storms. A similar weather pattern affected Spain as well, and lettuce is still in short supply. You may be experiencing knock on effects.
It tends to be very expensive up here in the northeast - $4 a head is a good price. Tend not to buy it except when it’s the only choice for a particular dinner, or on sale down to 2/$5 or $3.
Last I saw, in our store, the price was $5 a head for cauliflower and may have gone up since then. Iceberg lettuce was over $2 a head. The prices are usually around $2.40 and $1.29 respectively. It was also blamed on the weather in California.
I bought a medium sized head of cauliflower today without paying attention to the marked price. I mean, how much could it be? How about $6! WTF? The cashier pointed the price out and asked me if I still wanted it. Reluctantly, I said, “Yes”. I don’t know why. On the way out of the store I went by the bin and found out why I didn’t check the price. It was nowhere to be found. At $6, no wonder. NJ, FWIW.
I very rarely see cauliflower priced by the pound. They tend to be sorted by size (so that a whole case/load/shipment is much the same size) and priced by the head. But at a guess, that’s $4-6 a head.
^That should read “2.01 lb” not “$2.01lb”, of course. At any rate, what I would call a medium head of cauliflower. I don’t know if they consistently price it by the pound or not, but there’s certain produce where prices will vary from by the piece to by weight from week to week or month to month. Limes, in particularl. Usually, they’re something like 8-12 for a buck (today it was 8), but sometimes, it’ll be $1.99 or $2.99/lb or whatever. They do this primarily with produce such as lettuce, peppers, and lemons.
