Eat up: Crawfish supply high, prices low

ORLEANS — The 2020 crawfish season is off to a strong start, with reports of prices that are half what they were a year ago and two to three times the supply.

In Bucktown, the hub of seafood markets in Jefferson Parish by Lake Pontchartrain, Clint St. Philip, manager of Captain Sid’s Seafood, said size is still inconsistent, though he expects that to improve week to week.

“What’s really early is the price,” he said. “Last week, prices dropped 75 cents; it felt like mid-season as soon as that happened.”

According to The Crawfish App, which tracks prices, live crawfish are selling for as little as $2.29 a pound in south Louisiana, and boiled crawfish can be found for $3.49 a pound. Laney King, who co-founded the app with her husband, Ryan, said the average price a year ago for a pound of live crawfish was $4.50, and boiled crawfish cost nearly $7. King said prices usually aren’t that low until Mardi Gras, which is Feb. 25 this year.

“The warm winter weather really helped crawfish to grow and farmers to catch them,” she said. In response to the ample supply and to trigger customer demand for early crawfish boils, businesses are dropping prices.

Greg Lutz, a professor at the LSU AgCenter’s Aquaculture Research Station who has been studying crawfish for more than 30 years, said the weather patterns in the late summer and early fall have kept the supply high.

Crawfish eggs start to hatch in late August and the hatchlings cling to the tail of their mother for several weeks while she stays in her burrow. When a heavy rainfall happens, crawfish go out into ditches and ponds and the hatchlings disperse. “The rainfall we had got a lot of the crawfish out of the ground fairly early,” Lutz said.

Farmers are trying to maximize the yield and size of this year’s crop by selling off the early supply. Lutz said the density in ponds determines how big crawfish can grow.

“It doesn’t matter how much food you give them, if crawfish are crowded up in a pond, they’re not going to grow so well,” he said.

“A year ago, we were selling 60 to 80 sacks of crawfish a week,” said Will Boutte, owner-manager of Capital City Crawfish in Baton Rouge, a market that also has wholesale and catering operations.

“This year, live and boiled, we are selling about 250 sacks a week. We’re off to a real good start.”

While it’s still early and a lot of things could go wrong this season, like a late cold snap, Boutte said prices are on track to be the lowest in about eight years.

He predicts Capital City Crawfish will sell 800 to 900 sacks at the season’s Easter peak; last year it sold 500 to 600 sacks.

At Prejean’s in Lafayette, owner Bud Guilbeau said the quantity and low prices in late January prompted him to start selling boiled crawfish at the restaurant for the first time since 1995. When Prejean’s opened in 1980, it sold only boiled crawfish, crabs and shrimp, but it dropped the program because there was more demand for fried seafood and award-winning crawfish etouffee.

“Originally we were not going to start until early- to mid-February. It came out that crawfish were already good, and a lot of them. I decided to pull the trigger a little early, and it’s been good so far,” he said. “We’re still trying to get the word out. Our marketing plans were all geared toward early February. We’ve been trying to get the word out as much as we can.”

Justin LeBlanc has been selling crawfish since December at Bevi Seafood Co., in New Orleans.

Signs of a strong season are a relief for LeBlanc, who said last year was a “perfect storm” of difficulties between cold weather crimping the harvest and a late Lent pushing back the traditional high demand time for boils.

“People haven’t really started looking for it yet, they’re not having the backyard boils yet, so I think they’ll be surprised by where things are now,” he said. “It’s going to be a good Mardi Gras for boils.”