Mississippi crawfish abundant early, prices down
Published 12:00 pm Wednesday, December 30, 2015
PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi crawfish are plentiful early in the season and prices are down.
Keith Delcambre, owner of Bozo’s Seafood Market in Pascagoula, tells The Sun Herald (http://bit.ly/1Jfmhnk) his price per pound is $1.30 lower than it was when the season started in mid-November.
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Live, they were $2.80 a pound at his store Tuesday. Boiled, they were $3.59. Elsewhere on the Coast, the average is $3.23 per pound live and $4.25 boiled — $4.09 if you buy more than 10 pounds.
Delcambre predicts the price will stay down through most of January, barring a major freeze, then jump at the end of the month with the demand that comes with the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, and Mardi Gras on Feb. 9.
But even that kind of demand may not affect the price much, said longtime crawfish distributor Kevin Kidder with St. Martin Seafood Inc. of Breaux Bridge, La. He supplies seafood for markets all along the Gulf Coast.
“Crawfish caught good early this year,” he said. That means they came out of the ground and entered the traps. Colder weather means they stay in the ground and eat less.
“We had mild weather and plenty of rain,” he said, “so production was good.”
Kidder said it would take a hard freeze of four to five days to affect production. He predicts mild weather will keep prices down even for the Super Bowl, one of the top crawfish-boiling days of the year. Others, seafood sellers say, are Mardi Gras, Easter, Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.
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The season is mid-November to July for the freshwater mud bugs.
Delcambre remembers when 10 pounds sold for just under $10. He never thought he’d see people paying $35 to $50 for 10 pounds of crawfish, “but they do,” he said.
At $2.80 a pound, a sack of crawfish (which is about 33 pounds) will cost $92.
“When you pay $100 for a sack of crawfish, you want them pretty bad,” he said.
He predicts with Easter coming early this year, crawfish will stay up in price through Lent and then go down after Easter.
