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Lettuce Shortage?

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Rick_G

New member
Is this just a regional thing or is everyone feeling it? My normal source has iceberg available at over $60.00 per case, just under $70.00 for the cleaned and trimmed variety. For over a week we have been buying it at local grocery stores for a little more reasonable pricing. Today, 3 grocery stores near us are all out of lettuce. The Wal-Mart super center produce guy told me their shipment today only had one case, not even enough to stock the shelves once.
Are others experiencing this and does anybody know how long before it is expected to return to normal.
 
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Nope, have the same problem here. I never bought my lettuce with Roma(my supplier) because i have a King Soopers 100 yards from me. About the same price for much better Quality. About 3 weeks ago they hung up signs warning everyone that they are experiencing shortages and apologize.

I vaguely remember hearing about how the weather changing over this last winter has caused alot of damage to crops.
 
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In Feb out here in California we had actual rain for the first time in 10 years. We went from not enough water to too much water. It flooded all the lettuce fields and and caused a shortage. I would expect it to recover soon because it has been dry for 6 weeks and lettuce grows pretty fast.
 
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Both Iceburg and Romaine have been sky high for 3 weeks now around $70 a case and its shit.
Ive been soo lucky the past few years whenever something has skyrocketed in price like flap meat or cheese etc, I actually didnt sell much of that item. This time though non stop salads im almost triple my normal salad sales and paying more than triple for lettuce
 
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Paid about $65 a case for the past 3 weeks in pittsburgh

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Been hearing about the shortage from multiple places but haven’t seen any shortage here(southern california) just paid 21 bucks for a case of romaine. But like pirate mentioned above we had a TON of rain it literally took us out of an insane drought we were experiencing.

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should be seeing it get better this week…you know it’s bad when USFoods had no lettuce whatsoever to send on a Friday (luckily Costco had some). So I goto Costco the following week to avoid paying $75/case and they were out of stock too!
 
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famousperry said:
should be seeing it get better this week…you know it’s bad when USFoods had no lettuce whatsoever to send on a Friday (luckily Costco had some). So I goto Costco the following week to avoid paying $75/case and they were out of stock too!
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Usually, this is the best route for us mom/pops but this shortage is a big one. Costco has contract pricing (unlike most of us little guys) on all items including produce so this is what I usually do too. Prices should be coming down within the next 7-10 days.

For awhile, the quality was so bad that I stopped selling the two salads with lettuce unless the customer was fine with using Spinach as a replacement. I had my servers/phone people explain the situation and that we refuse to serve a poor quality product and that seemed to help customer service and most ended up going with Spinach.
 
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We’ve seen the effects here on the eastern shore also. For the last few weeks we’ve been running back and forth to our local grocery store and Sam’s Club to get lettuce and romaine. Just recently we have started purchasing shredded lettuce and salad mix from our suppliers as it’s been somewhat cheaper.
 
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sky high here too. I use spring mix to so everything has been getting spring mix for the past 3 weeks.(even the Caesar salad :eek:) it has stayed consistent this whole time.
 
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durbancic said:
we use a 70/30 ice/rom blend. $26.40 this week for 20#.

I see most of you use cases of lettuce. Do you find this to be much better than buying pre-processed bags? We usually pay appx $1/# for the chopped 70/30.
Looking here: http://www.taylorfarmsfoodservice.com/index.php/load-calculator/C164 it looks like the yield isn’t that much more and the cost for a case of lettuce is much higher than the pre-chopped.
Dan
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we blend bagged rom/ice mix&color with romaine heads that we chop…find much better results in taste and volume in this method
 
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