I have been reading about how crab prices are up this year. One article from July quoted a restaurant owner as saying he has been paying up to $34 a pound, and that’s wholesale. However, I don’t know if that’s for picked crab meat or whole crabs.
I was in two different Asian grocery stores this week and they both had live crabs for $3.99 a pound. Restaurants are selling cooked crabs for anywhere from $35 a dozen to $60 depending on size. I don’t know how many pounds are in a dozen but $3.99 a pound seems exceptionally reasonable considering this year’s shortage.
Newcomb also says he’s not worried and suggests that the bigger problem is not having enough migrant workers to pick crab.
“If we don’t have our workers…that controls everything. Mother nature takes care of the crabs that goes up and down, but we need to have our workers,” Newcomb says.
He says he thinks the federal government needs to lift the cap on crab worker visas that’s been the same since the early 1990s.
Live crabs are generally sold by the dozen. Crab meat is sold by the pound. Asian grocery stores usually march to the beat of their own drums, but I’ve personally never seen anyone weigh live crabs before. It seems a strange way to price them. I wonder if it basically works out the same?
The weight-to-size ratio of crabs varies considerably, but here’s a data point: I just weighed a seven inch crab(cooler-dead, not live) on my kitchen scale a few minutes ago and it came in at 14 ounces. That translates to 10.5 lbs per dozen, which at $3.99/lb would be $41.90/dozen, so the grocery store and restaurant prices are at least similar, depending on the actual size of ‘large’ or small’ when you buy them by the dozen.
I just happen to have 32 blue crabs in a cooler right now, and they are from Matagorda Bay, not Chesapeake Bay.