Three Bad Harvests Leave Sweet Potatoes Small and Pricey

Three consecutive difficult growing seasons have tightened U.S. sweet potato supply, and shoppers should expect smaller potatoes and higher prices heading into Thanksgiving, according to a Forbes report published Aug. 23, 2026.

The sweet potato is one of the few items on the American Thanksgiving table that almost nobody buys the rest of the year in any volume. That concentration of demand into a few weeks is exactly what makes a tight crop hurt. And this year, according to a report from Forbes Business, three straight rough growing seasons have left U.S. supply tight enough that shoppers should expect smaller potatoes and higher prices by November.

Why three bad seasons compound instead of cancel out

A single poor harvest in a storage crop is usually absorbable. Sweet potatoes cure and hold for months, so a strong prior year can carry a weak one. What breaks that cushion is repetition. When the second bad season follows the first, the buffer stock that normally smooths supply is already gone. By the third, there is nothing left to draw down, and the market is living hand to mouth off whatever comes out of the ground.

The consequence shows up in two ways rather than one. The obvious one is price. The less obvious one — and the one shoppers will actually notice first — is size. Poor growing conditions produce a smaller average tuber, which shifts the whole grade distribution downward. The jumbo and No. 1 grades that retailers prefer for bulk produce displays become scarcer, while smaller sizes that normally get diverted into processing, fries or canned product make up more of the pack. A store can still fill the bin. It just fills it with something the customer thinks looks wrong.

Growers face the same squeeze from the other direction

It is tempting to read a tight crop as good news for farmers, and sometimes it is. Scarcity lifts the price of what does get harvested. But three consecutive difficult seasons is not a pricing story for growers, it is a solvency story. Land costs, seed, labor and fuel are spent before anyone knows what the yield will be. A grower who has absorbed reduced output three years running has paid full input costs three times against short revenue three times.

That matters for what comes next. Repeated losses tend to push acreage out of a crop, and acreage does not come back quickly. Sweet potatoes are propagated from slips, which requires planning a season ahead. If growers respond to a third bad year by planting something less exposed, the supply response arrives with a lag — and the tightness outlasts the weather that caused it.

Where the cost lands between the field and the checkout

Produce pricing is not a straight pass-through. Between the grower and the shelf sit packers, shippers, distributors and the retailer, and each of them decides how much of a cost increase to absorb. For a holiday staple, grocers face a specific tension: sweet potatoes are a traffic item in November, part of a basket that includes turkey, stuffing and pie ingredients. Chains that build Thanksgiving marketing around a low headline basket price have an incentive to hold the line on sweet potatoes and recover margin elsewhere.

That means the price a shopper sees may understate what happened in the field. The adjustment can arrive instead as a change in what is offered — fewer promotional displays, tighter limits, more bagged product and fewer loose bulk potatoes, and a visible shift toward smaller sizes at the same per-pound price. Foodservice buyers, restaurants and institutional kitchens generally have less protection than a supermarket shopper does, because their contracts reprice closer to the market.

What to watch between now and November

The critical window is the harvest and curing period that runs into the fall. Sweet potatoes are dug and then held in warm, humid conditions to heal the skin before storage; a crop that comes out of the ground in poor shape stores badly, which can turn a modest shortfall into a larger one by the time the holiday demand spike hits. Losses in storage are the difference between a tight market and an empty one.

Three things will tell the story:

The condition of the crop at harvest, not just its volume — damaged tubers do not hold.
The grade mix that packers report, since a heavy skew to small sizes signals what the produce aisle will look like.
Whether retailers advertise sweet potatoes as a Thanksgiving loss leader in October, which would indicate they intend to eat the cost rather than pass it on.

A small item in a broader grocery picture

Sweet potatoes are a narrow category, and no single vegetable moves a national inflation reading. But the pattern is one that has recurred across specialty crops in recent years: production concentrated in a handful of growing regions, a run of adverse weather, and a consumer who encounters the result as a smaller product at a familiar price rather than an obviously higher bill. That form of adjustment is easy to miss in the data and impossible to miss in the cart.

Broader markets, for their part, were untroubled by any of it. The S&P 500 tracker (NYSEARCA: SPY) finished its most recent session at $765.72, up 0.41% from the prior close of $762.60, with the Nasdaq 100 fund (NASDAQ: QQQ) at $713.44 and the Dow tracker (NYSEARCA: DIA) at $532.22, as of the last trade on Fri, 21 Aug 2026. Produce shortfalls of this scale register with households and with the growers who bear the loss, not with index investors.

For shoppers, the practical takeaway is unglamorous. If the November display looks thin or the potatoes look undersized, that is the third consecutive difficult season arriving at the store — and buying earlier in the month, when the pipeline is fullest, is likely to be the better move than waiting for the week of the holiday.

Key facts

Cause of shortage: Three consecutive rough U.S. sweet potato growing seasons
Expected shopper impact: Smaller sweet potatoes and higher prices this Thanksgiving
Benchmark close: SPY $765.72, +0.41%, as of Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:00 GMT
Report date: Aug. 23, 2026 (Forbes Business)

Frequently asked questions

Why are sweet potatoes in short supply?

Three consecutive difficult growing seasons have tightened U.S. sweet potato supply. A single weak harvest is usually absorbed by stored crop from the prior year, but repeated poor seasons exhaust that buffer. By the third year there is little carryover stock left, so the market depends almost entirely on current-year output.

Will sweet potatoes cost more this Thanksgiving?

Shoppers should expect higher prices this Thanksgiving, according to the Forbes report on the tightened supply. How much of the increase reaches the shelf depends on retailers, since sweet potatoes are a holiday traffic item that some grocers may choose to price aggressively while recovering margin on other parts of the basket.

Why will the potatoes be smaller?

Poor growing conditions reduce the average size of the tuber, shifting the whole grade distribution downward. That leaves fewer of the large No. 1 and jumbo grades retailers prefer for bulk displays, and a higher proportion of small sizes that would normally be diverted into processing rather than sold fresh.

Does a tight crop benefit sweet potato growers?

Not after three bad years. Scarcity can lift the price of what is harvested, but growers pay for land, seed, slips, labor and fuel before knowing the yield. Absorbing short output three seasons running means paying full input costs against reduced revenue three times, which pressures finances rather than improving them.

How quickly can supply recover?

Not quickly. Sweet potatoes are grown from slips, so planting decisions are made a season ahead. If repeated losses push growers to switch to other crops, acreage takes time to return. That lag means tight supply can persist beyond the weather conditions that originally caused the shortfall.

What should shoppers do about it?

Buying earlier in November, when the supply pipeline is fullest, is generally safer than waiting until the week of Thanksgiving, when demand for the crop peaks in a few concentrated days. Expect to see smaller sizes, more bagged product and fewer promotional bulk displays than in a normal year.

Sources

Why You Could Have Trouble Finding Sweet Potatoes At Grocery Stores Soon — Forbes Business

Photo: Engin Akyurt · Pexels Licence — source