“Overall, 2024 production was down about a third,” said David Bradley, director of business development for Nash Produce. “While the bulk of the company’s sweet potatoes were planted at the usual time, a few southern North Carolina Nash Produce growers were able to jump start the new crop a little early.”

Bradley said that’s helping Nash Produce bridge any gaps that would have occurred from season to season, and allow some new-crop cured sweet potatoes to ship a month earlier than normal.

“I would say that on any given year, around Oct. 15 is when we transition crops,” he said. “This year it will probably be mid-September, to kind of mitigate some of that risk.”

As growers planted this season, moisture levels in the ground were good, with optimal heat to spur development, he said. Plant conditions were prime from mid-May to mid- and late June. Growers in late August and early September, however, needed rain.

“We’re needing some rain at the moment to help finish sizing up this crop,” Bradley said the first week of September. “We’ve had a few folks dig, the guys who planted early, but for the remainder of our grower base, they need a little bit more rain right now to finish up the crop.”

Although the North Carolina sweet potato industry was facing lower production, shippers for the most part treated 2024 Thanksgiving and fall retail needs as they would in a normal season, ensuring stores had what they needed on the shelves.

“We knew it was going to be a shorter crop, we talked to our grower base about it,” Bradley said. “But Thanksgiving and the holiday time, volume was consistent (with a normal year).

“We reassessed our inventory and started forecasting at the beginning of this year to figure out how we were going to make it work,” he said. “Once we realized that, yeah, we might not have as strong as an inventory as we had in previous years, we started going out and finding more potatoes and that’s how we’ve managed our inventory for the remainder of the 2024 crop”

It’s critical to update customers on the status of the crop before the harvest is over, he said, to maintain good relations.

“Conversations like that and just staying in front of them and being transparent about what the crop’s looking like, (is key),” Bradley said. “And in turn, we try to receive feedback from them, to see how consumer trends are going and see how we can create more value for them.”

The company’s Mr. Yam label features bulk and a variety of packs, including individual microwaveable sweet potatoes, tray packs and smaller mesh bags.

The company is “testing the waters” on a 1.5-pound “pillow pack” of smaller, fingerling-size sweet potatoes.