Higher Gas Prices Are Seeping Into the Produce Aisle

By Owen Tucker-Smith  | May 10, 2026 12:00 pm ET The Wall Street Journal

A series of economic challenges, from tariffs to stretched consumers, has hit the food industry in the past year. Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

Having absorbed various price shocks, firms are less able to avoid passing on additional costs to retailers and consumers

HUNTS POINT, N.Y.—Stefanie Katzman’s celery is starting to feel the pinch of $5.66-a-gallon diesel.

Her food-distribution company buys fresh stalks from farmers in California and trucks them nearly 3,000 miles to a maze of chilled warehouses in New York City’s Bronx borough. That journey costs $11,000—46% more than it did last year.

Workers at the three-million-square-foot New York market, the largest food-distribution center in the country, unload the celery and drive it into the city, paying for even more diesel along the way. By the time the celery sleeve arrives at the corner store, it is around 40 cents pricier than it would be otherwise.

The Hunts Point Produce Market, perched on a peninsula jutting into the East River, has morphed into a battleground in the food industry’s scramble to react to the past year’s economic challenges: tariffs, stretched consumers, abnormal weather and, now, climbing costs to get their lettuce and lemons from point A to point B triggered by the surge in diesel prices.

At the Hunts Point Produce Market, where a worker operated a cart in November 2022, vendors are watching profit margins shrink. Andres Kudacki/AP

The rise in fuel prices affects “every part of the supply chain, because fuel is used everywhere,” said Katzman, chief executive of a distributor that operates out of the market. “That’s where you really feel a change.”

Vendors at the market are watching their profit margins dwindle and weighing just how much they can raise prices, aware that many of their customers are also struggling to get by. Some are choosing to pass their costs along, resigned to the fact that they have little choice.

Vendor Bill Taubenfeld is passing along a jump in fuel costs to the street-corner vendors who sell his avocados, which are grown in Mexico, trucked to a distribution center in McAllen, Tex., and driven north to the Bronx. Michael Cochran is calculating and tacking on additional per-box fuel costs to the Florida lemons he sells to local retailers.

Produce costs were already heading north when the Strait of Hormuz’s closure in March sent a shock through energy markets. Prices of fruits and vegetables rose more than 2% during February and March after ticking up less than 1% throughout 2025.

Take asparagus. A cold snap crimped supply. Mother’s Day flower shipments squeezed the availability of trucks. Now companies need to pay even more to fly it from South America to Florida, and then up to the northeast.

“If you’re flying in asparagus from Peru to Miami and then you’ve got to put it on a truck to New York, you better believe there’s a lot of transportation cost in there,” said Dan Spoerel of Pan Hellenic Foods.

On a recent night, asparagus was selling at Hunts Point for around $60 for 11 pounds, Spoerel said. In May of last year, the same amount of Peru asparagus sold at Hunts Point for $32.

Produce prices often swing wildly because of weather conditions, demand and trade policies. It’s also hard to quantify rises in food prices in real-time, because economic indicators such as the consumer-price index can take months to reflect the full impact of energy shocks.

The March producer-price index, which measures the costs that food makers pay, indicated that fuel prices might be starting to eat into wholesalers’ margins.

Michigan State University food economist David Ortega said fruits and vegetables tend to feel some of the earliest effects of surges in fuel prices since they often have to travel long distances in a hurry, in temperature-controlled environments. Energy, storage and transportation costs make up roughly 12% of the price of a vegetable, for example, compared with less than 8% for snacks and bakery products.

Not everyone is raising prices yet, because not everyone can. Daniel Barabino at Top Banana, a major Northeast distributor of Dole bananas, is already burdened by the heightened costs of trucking boxes of unripe bananas from the Port of Wilmington, Del., to New York—an extra 50 cents a box, he said.

But because his competitors aren’t raising prices yet, Barabino can’t either—and demand for bananas, which he says consumers expect to be cheap, is sensitive to price rises. Soon, the price of shipping bananas across the sea from Costa Rica will reset for the new quarter, at which point Barabino will likely need to start passing higher costs through.

Often distributors try to absorb unexpected costs, sensitive that customers react poorly to expensive food. But over the past year, companies already have absorbed the costs of various other price shocks, leaving them with less wiggle room to avoid passing costs on to retailers and consumers, according to Purdue University economists Kenneth Foster and Bernhard Dalheimer.

Foster said the pressure on the industry could increase soon. Distributors absorbed early cost rises on the assumption that the war would end quickly. Uncertainty about the length of the conflict has altered that calculus.

“If I’m managing a distribution supply chain, I’m looking at this conflict and thinking…this is a long-term shift in my costs,” Foster said. “And I can’t absorb it longer term.”

Major food companies have said price increases are coming, regardless of how the war unfolds in the short term. Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, chief executive of Fresh Del Monte Produce, told investors last week that higher fertilizer and packaging costs, in addition to transportation expenses, were rippling through the company’s supply chain.

Workers inspecting pineapples at a Del Monte Fresh plant in Costa Rica. randall campos/AFP/Getty Images

Some fruits and vegetables were getting cheaper when the war began; those items might see little to no price increase. But others already were facing steep climbs because of weather conditions and tariffs—tomatoes, for example, were 22% more expensive in March than they were a year earlier, according to Labor Department data. “It’s a double whammy,” said Spoerel of Pan Hellenic Foods. “When you’ve got rising commodity prices coupled with rising freight rates—that’s when things start to get out of control.”

Jason Turek, a fourth-generation grower of sweet corn in New York state, has watched his freight cost per shipment jump from $4,000 last year to roughly $6,600 this year. He is actively negotiating new prices with customers.

Higher fertilizer and transportation costs, he said, could put many farms in jeopardy.

“At a certain point, it’s not worth picking up the crop, just to ship it up the road at a loss,” he said.

Visit The Wall Street Journal for the original article.

Appeared in the May 11, 2026, print edition as 'High Fuel Prices Seep Into the Produce Aisle'.

Owen Tucker-Smith is a news associate at The Wall Street Journal in New York. He joined the Journal as a summer 2024 intern in Washington, where he wrote about Congress and the 2024 election. Owen recently graduated from Yale University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in statistics and data