The Price of the British Season: What Five Years of Wholesale Data Show

Most kitchens judge produce cost one quote at a time. A price lands on Tuesday, it gets compared with last Tuesday's, and the conversation ends there. But a kitchen's produce spend is not decided week by week — it is decided by the shape of the year: when each crop's British season opens, when volume peaks, and when the market tightens again. That shape is measurable, and it repeats.

To put numbers on it, we analysed Defra's weekly wholesale fruit and vegetable price series (2026) — a public dataset, updated fortnightly, with machine-readable weekly records running back to November 2017. We worked through 24 chef-relevant series across the calendar years 2021 to 2025, from asparagus to swede.

The headline is simple. For most crops, the first weeks of a British season carry the year's highest wholesale prices, and the price eases as volume builds — a pattern that repeats, crop after crop, year after year. The rest of this piece puts figures on that rule, names the exceptions, and sets out what a kitchen can do with it.

How to read these numbers

Honesty first, because averages get misused. These are wholesale-market average prices for home-grown produce, collected by Defra at Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and one London market — New Spitalfields or Western International. They are not retail prices. They are not New Covent Garden Market prices. And they are not Produce Network's prices — nothing below describes what we charge, and you should not read our list off these figures. What the series records is the average of the most usual prices charged by wholesalers at those markets.

The method is deliberately plain. Each monthly figure is the mean of five yearly monthly means across 2021 to 2025, and a month is cited only where at least 3 of the 5 years have observations. That smooths single-year shocks — a late frost, a fuel spike — and leaves the repeating seasonal shape. Each swing is simply the gap between a crop's cheapest and dearest month, as a percentage, so every one can be checked straight off the two prices shown.

One more scope note. Because the series covers home-grown supply, a crop only appears while British product is on the market. Asparagus shows up from March to July; strawberries from March to November. The gaps are filled by imports, at prices this dataset does not see.

The season window is the price story

Take asparagus, the most-watched British crop of the spring. Its home-grown window runs March to July, and the five-year averages put March at £17.62 per kilo against May at £8.76 — a 101% swing from the season's dearest month to its cheapest (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025).

That is not a quirk of one vegetable. Strawberries open in March at £7.97 per kilo and fall to £2.97 by August, a 168% swing, according to Defra's five-year averages.

Outdoor rhubarb runs the same pattern — £3.29 in March down to £1.80 in August, an 83% swing — and runner beans compress it into a single summer: £7.12 in June, £3.29 by September, a 116% swing (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025).

Round tomatoes tell the same story from under glass: the home-grown window opens in April at £1.68 per kilo and finds its floor in July at £0.92, an 83% swing, according to Defra's series.

The mechanism is not mysterious. The first weeks of a season are scarce weeks — the earliest fields, the first tunnels, and buyers keen to put British on the menu before their neighbours do. Volume builds, more growers come on stream, and the price finds its floor once supply has caught up. The working rule that falls out of five years of data: for most crops, the opening weeks of a British season are the most expensive time of year to buy, and the price bottoms out later, once the season is in full flow.

The size of the effect varies by crop, and for a few so does its direction. Shelling peas barely move, with a 14% swing across their June-to-September window, while courgettes swing 66% and cucumbers 63% between their extremes (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025). A handful of summer crops invert the rule — courgettes are dearest late in their window, not at its open — but the opening-weeks-dearest shape is the one the data returns far more often than not.

Year-round staples still swing

It would be easy to assume the seasonal shape only matters for the headline crops. The staples say otherwise.

• White cabbage is cheapest in January at £0.46 per kilo and dearest in June at £0.88 — a 91% swing on the most ordinary vegetable in the store (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)
• Red cabbage runs the same curve: £0.54 in January, £1.00 in June, an 85% swing (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)
• Cauliflower peaks exactly where you would expect — December, at £1.38 a head against March's £0.87, a 59% swing driven by the Christmas order book (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)
• Carrots, topped and washed, are cheapest in December at £0.50 per kilo and dearest in June at £0.75 — a 50% swing that tracks the handover from old-crop store to new-crop harvest (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)
• Spring greens bottom out in September at £1.19 per kilo and peak in March at £1.76, a 48% swing (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)
• Parsnips invert the root-vegetable rule — cheapest in February at £1.10 per kilo, dearest in August at £1.57, a 43% swing, because summer parsnips are scarce parsnips (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025)

Note the pattern inside the pattern. Brassicas and roots are cheapest through the cold months, when British storage and winter harvest run at full flow, and dearest in early summer, when the old crop is running out and the new crop has not landed. June is the expensive month for cabbage, carrots and leeks alike — the hungry gap, visible in a price file.

Some staples barely move at all. Celeriac swings just 11% across the year, curly kale 20%, trimmed leeks 27% — worth knowing, because a flat series means a quote that jumps sharply deserves a question (source: Defra weekly wholesale price series, 2021–2025).

What a kitchen does with this

First, menu timing. Put the seasonal dish on when the season's middle arrives, not its first week. The urge to be first to British asparagus is real, but the data says the opening weeks are the dearest the crop will see all year. Wait for volume to build and the same plate carries a markedly lower ingredient cost — with better, more consistent fruit into the bargain.

Second, spec conversations. If the dish needs strawberries in April, cost it knowing April sits near the top of the curve; if it can wait until July, the curve works for you. The same logic sits underneath seasonal provenance decisions — British where possible is a good instinct, but it has a calendar and a cost curve attached, and the two should be planned together.

Third, interrogate quotes against the seasonal shape, not against last week. A carrot price that rises into June is the market doing what it does every year; a carrot price that rises into December is worth a phone call. Knowing the shape turns a price list from a take-it-or-leave-it document into something you can actually read — and the produce list you order from should stand up to that reading.

There is a cash-flow angle too. Seasonal swings make produce spend lumpy even when covers are flat — one more reason credit terms matter as much as unit price when you choose a supplier, and part of the wider picture of how a supplier moves your food costs.

We have written before about building a seasonal produce strategy; this dataset is the quantitative floor under that advice.

Produce Network's part in this is straightforward: buy well inside the shape of the season and be plain about it. If you want to see how that works commercially, pricing sets it out without ceremony.

What this data cannot say

Every dataset has edges, and it is worth being direct about these.

• It is not London-specific. The averages pool Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and one London market, so a London kitchen's reality can sit above or below the line.
• It is home-grown only. When the British window closes, imports fill the gap at prices this series does not record — the March asparagus figure describes the first British spears, not the imported product on the stand beside them.
• It is not variety-complete. A wholesale average for strawberries spans everything from jam fruit to the top trays on the market; your spec sits somewhere inside that spread, not on the average.
• It is an average of averages. Five-year monthly means smooth the years by design, and any single season will diverge — a wet June or a late spring moves real prices in ways the mean cannot show.

None of that weakens the working rule. Across five years, 24 series and four wholesale markets, the dominant shape holds: most seasons open dear, find their floor as volume builds, and the staples breathe with the storage calendar. A kitchen that plans against that shape — rather than against last Tuesday's quote — spends better without changing a single thing about its cooking. The data is public, updated fortnightly, and free to check: Defra publishes the full series on gov.uk (2026).