Morning Star Tomato Bites – October 2025

Record Yields and Quality Define California’s 2025 Tomato Season

Morning Star colleague Aaron Giampietro is back with another TOMATO BITES by Morning Star update. In this edition, we recap the close of California’s 2025 tomato harvest—a standout season defined by exceptional fruit quality, strong yields, and consistent paste performance. We highlight market stability across both conventional and organic segments, share insight into emerging logistics developments, and look ahead to 2026 planning as California processors and growers prepare for the season ahead.

Hello everyone, this is Aaron Giampietro from The Morning Star Packing Company with your October 22, 2025 Tomato Bite Update.

This week marks the end of the 2025 harvest, bringing in the final tomatoes from what has been a truly remarkable season for California. It was a year defined by ideal growing weather, exceptional fruit quality, and record-high field yields — a rare combination that doesn’t come often and one that California’s growers can take real pride in.

Concurrently, buyers of bulk tomato paste from California can now recall three consecutive years of strong crop performance, adding a level of consistency that builds real confidence for customers. When you combine ample supply with the high color and viscosity performance we’ve seen in 2025, it means our partners can go to market knowing they’ll have seamless coverage and top-tier quality in every shipment.

These observations also extend to organic production, where the same strong yields and disciplined planting decisions have created ample supply, high quality, and balanced pricing. This is showing up in two key areas for California:

First, we’re seeing domestic organic demand rebuild after the pullback from 2023 crop high-price environment.

And second, export demand remains strong and expanding, a testament to California’s delivered-cost effectiveness in reaching global markets.

Conventional paste from this season delivered phenomenal color, especially in cold break paste, where our cold extraction system amplified the natural red hue.

Our bench-top homogenization trials on hot break paste show excellent viscosity pickup — making this the second-best ketchup performance we’ve seen in the past seven years. That’s encouraging news for ketchup manufacturers looking for yield recovery and consistent performance after the last two consecutive years of softer ketchup yields.

On the logistics front, new U.S. port fees on Chinese-built and Chinese-owned vessels officially began last week. These tariffs are part of a broader trade measure aimed at balancing shipbuilding competition and protecting U.S. maritime interests.

In response, China has announced retaliatory fees on U.S.-owned or partially U.S.-flagged fleets, which adds a new layer of complexity to global freight. While this doesn’t immediately stop the flow of goods, it introduces pricing uncertainty and potential scheduling volatility — not just for Pacific routes, but across the global bulk shipping network. Carriers are rerouting vessels, capacity is shifting, and transit costs are rising in the near term.

Even with these shifts, California continues to hold an advantage as our combination of domestic rail and truck distribution and established export partnerships provides a reliable and flexible path to keep product moving efficiently where it’s needed most.

As we wrap up this record season, planning for 2026 is already underway — evaluating acreage needs, variety selection, and closely monitoring the developing La Niña pattern that could influence winter precipitation and water storage.

Reservoir levels remain healthy for now, but we’ll continue watching how those weather systems evolve through the winter. You can find more detail on these topics in our newsletter published alongside this video.

We look forward to working with our customer and supply chain partners to see how this exceptional 2025 crop unlocks new value and marketing opportunities, and how its performance carries all the way through to the end user.

Even though the summer harvest and visiting season has come to a close, our team remains ready to engage anytime with questions or market discussions. For more updates, you can also visit our website for the latest market insights, including current pricing.

Thank you!