A hard crawfish to swallow: Crawfish prices expected to stay high through start of Lent

Publish date: 2024-08-04

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Across Louisiana, seafood markets are struggling to keep crawfish season alive.

“Nothing sells like hot boiled crawfish,” Jeff Pohlmann of Today’s Ketch in St. Bernard said.

But this year, there are empty trays at full tables. After the hottest summer on record and extreme drought, Pohlmann says the culprit is an abysmal crawfish harvest supply.

“We are in a crunch also as much as the crawfish and you know, everybody thinks that this $13 a pound that we’re getting now is highway robbery,” Pohlmann said. “We should be much higher than that.”

The small harvests are bottlenecking at the seafood markets.

“We got in three sacks today and we kind of get it every other day,” Salvo Seafood’s general manager, Amelia Vujnovich said. “It’s starting to come every week, but it’s a really slow start to the season.”

Vujnovich says if the price was lower, they’d be selling four or five times as much crawfish.

Now that fishermen and farmers are harvesting enough to meet a weekly delivery schedule, prices should start to drop, but market owners say as for both supply and price, this crawfish season won’t start looking familiar until the start of March.

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Salvo’s Seafood in Belle Chasse gets its crawfish from two vendors. Vujnovich says one has its own pond and the other one picks up.

“He’s only picking up 10 sacks every other day to split between three restaurants,” Vujnovich said. “So, it’s just really not a lot of supply right now.”

Seafood markets lose even more money after they walk the crawfish to weed out any that died in transport. That typically comes out to around three or four pounds for each sack.

“To throw $10 a pound away that’s just a total loss -- it is a hard crawfish to swallow,” Pohlmann said.

Vujnovich says no one is happy with the prices.

“It isn’t good for consumers. It’s not good for the fishermen,” Vujnovich said. “All we can do is pray that rain will help the Spillway and the ponds hopefully bring up the catch and lower the price.”

Until then, what was once an entree is now an appetizer.

“People usually get 10 pounds. We have a 10-pound special here. Now they ask for two pounds,” Pohlmann said. “A little tease you know what I’m saying? But I can understand at the price, the cost is just up there.”

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A hard crawfish to swallow: Crawfish prices expected to stay high through start of Lent