Sunday, October 5, 2025

Berries are America’s top-selling fruit — and every parent’s grocery bill nightmare

Berry spending topped $12B in the last year. Many parents felt like their own kids accounted for all of it.

BY MARK DENT

A year ago, outside Chicago, Hillary Grady was shopping for groceries when her young daughter devoured an entire carton of raspberries in the store.

Let that sink in for a second: In. The. Store.

It started with Grady asking her daughter, who was three at the time, what fruit she wanted. It escalated to screaming: She wanted the raspberries now! Grady negotiated — a savvy decision — letting her daughter eat two berries, so she could fill up the grocery cart in peace.

About 20 minutes later, Grady looked down at the carton.

“And it was completely gone,” she says. “We had to go back to the produce section and buy a whole ‘nother one.”

The cashier gave her a strange look as he rang up the empty carton — “I’m like, ‘I know, we finished it’” — and Grady got a crash course in how a toddler’s berry appetite can leave an asteroid-sized crater in a grocery budget.

The Hustle has two new parents on staff and another (me) expecting a child soon. We acknowledge the pain of parents worldwide and wanted to show, with cold, hard data, that you’re not alone on this difficult journey.

We surveyed 237 parents about their fruit-buying budgets, and berries represent a significant and terrifying expense.

• The average amount spent on berries per month (including strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries) is $53.
• Many respondents report spending $200 or more per month on berries.
• 32% of respondents said their kids typically eat a carton of berries in a single day.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

This spending has made berries the top-selling fresh US fruit category by dollar sales, $12.6B in the 52-week period ending August 10, according to Circana OmniMarket Integrated Fresh. That total accounts for nearly 25% of all aisle-fresh fruit spending.

“We just keep throwing money at berries,” says Susie Boles, a mother of two in North Carolina.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

There’s a pretty easy explanation for why berries take up a disproportionate amount of a grocery bill. According to USDA data, the per-pound cost of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries is more than 3x the cost of an apple and ~8x-10x the cost of bananas. Even clementines are cheap in comparison, costing roughly one-third what berries do.

The only fruits with a comparable per-pound cost to berries are better suited to the “Matlock” crowd: figs, cherries, apricots, and dried prunes.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

For some families, the high cost of berries is a dealbreaker.

According to a survey by produce industry trade publication The Packer, households making $25k-$50k annually are ~50% less likely to purchase blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries than households making $100k+. (The purchasing gap for apples between low-income and high-income households is much smaller.)

But it’s not just the per-pound cost that has elevated berries to the top of fruit sales and that has mystified parents. It’s how quickly kids crush berries. That story from Hillary Grady at the grocery store? It wasn’t the only time it happened. Just the first.

Brandon Shangraw, who has two daughters in Dallas-Fort Worth, says berries have become “an appetizer” to almost every meal for his youngest, with strawberries practically mandatory before she’ll eat anything else for breakfast. Early on in their parental journey, he and his wife started buying berries for their kids because they were a healthy, easy way to introduce fruit into their diets.

“That’s turned into something else where they’re ever-present in our life,” Shangraw says. He wonders if they accidentally conditioned their kids into needing berries.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

But parents who’ve raised their kids on berries — for the ease of chewing for toddlers, for the antioxidants — have also been pushed along by the very visible hand of the produce industry. Driscoll’s, the largest berry seller in the US, began working in the 1980s to make berries available year-round and more attractive in color, transforming them from a seasonal treat to a daily necessity. 

In 2017, Driscoll’s president Soren Bjorn explained to the New Yorker that rather than operate as a typical produce company that sells what it can grow, Driscoll’s sees itself as a consumer-products company. “We create the demand,” he said. “It’s more like Procter & Gamble.” 

The privately-held company has been tight-lipped about its size, but told the New Yorker it accounted for about one-third of the US berry market. (Driscoll’s did not respond to The Hustle’s interview request.)

Since 1990, per capita availability of strawberries (a proxy for consumption) has increased 2x; for blueberries, it’s increased nearly 8x, according to the USDA. That’s happened as consumption of fruits like plums, oranges, peaches, and pears has declined.  

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Of course, parents realize they could be spending money on far worse things than berries. Several told The Hustle they’d far prefer their children be addicted to a tasty fruit than processed sweets.

Some go to great lengths to feed that addiction.

Jimmy Leonard is the parent of three boys under 7, all of whom, he says, “just consume berries all the time.” When his family moved to a new area of Knoxville, Tennessee, a neighbor tossed him a lifeline: a raspberry sprig. Soon, raspberries multiplied across their yard. They’ve since planted strawberries, too.  

Homegrown berries have saved the family ~$40 per month, Leonard says. But, if anything, the proximity has only enhanced the berry appetites of their boys, who tend to eat their favorite snack straight off the vine.

“The raspberries,” Leonard says, “don’t make it in the house.”

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