Blueberry punnet prices skyrocket to as high as $14.99 per 125g across Adelaide

Shoppers across Adelaide have been left shocked after seeing blueberry punnets priced as high as $14.99.

Adelaide shoppers have been left stunned after seeing the jaw-dropping price tag for a punnet of blueberries.

A stall in the Adelaide Central Market was spotted selling Driscoll’s blueberry punnets for $14.99. Romeo’s Foodland Lockleys is retailing the same packet for $14.50.

The Lockleys customer shared their dismay on Reddit.

“What happened to the good old days when they were like $2.99 a punnet? How could they possibly be those prices in metropolitan Adelaide?” they wrote.

Jumbo blueberries for sale for $14.99 a punnet at Aubergine’s in the Central Market. Picture: Supplied

Romeo’s Foodland Lockleys is retailing a Driscoll’s blueberry punnet for $14.50. Source: Reddit.

But owner of The Blueberry Patch in Mount Compass, Grant Gartrell, says customers shouldn’t be in a hurry to slam prices.

The current supply of Driscoll’s blueberries is off-season and are being brought in from interstate. Additionally, the process of growing blueberries is tedious, he said.

“Blueberries are not an easy crop to grow at all; the best blueberries are hand-picked and then stored so that they can be allowed to turn blue and then there are another couple of weeks needed for them to get all their flavour,” Mr Gartrell told The Advertiser.

“It’s very important to take extra care of the blueberries in all of it’s stages and the equipment to do so well is really quite expensive, especially the netting.

“So people should expect to pay a reasonable amount of money at any given time – the prices we are seeing at the moment are really only so high because the blueberries that are left are really far and few between.”

Mr Gartrell said the current pricing was a clear sign of supply and demand.

The Blueberry Patch owner went on to detail the difficulty his own farm faced in developing a crop this past season.

“It was a pretty rotten season for our land specifically but I’m sure other local growers had their own problems,” he said.

“We had a terrible storm in September which ruined our netting in a section of our land and this meant birds could get in and ruined our supply.

“But I know other farms had pollen problems which just meant they couldn’t produce their crop.”

Driscoll’s and Romeo’s Foodland Lockleys has been contacted for a comment.