U.S. retail price of lettuce 1995-2019

In 2019, the U.S. price for one pound of lettuce amounted to almost one and a half U.S. dollars. Back in the nineties, the average cost per pound was less than 70 cents.

Lettuce sales and consumption

With a sales share of approximately 80 percent, 2019’s best-selling type of lettuce was fresh cut salad by far. Iceberg lettuce captured a share of about ten percent of U.S. lettuce sales in that year. That being said, annual U.S. per capita consumption of fresh lettuce (head) has dropped considerably over the last two decades. While consumers in the United States ate over 20 pounds of lettuce on average in the year 2000, this number dropped to just over ten pounds by 2019.

Eat your vegetables

In 2019, about 60 percent of people in the United States bought and ate potatoes, making it the most consumed vegetable in the country. Some other favorites among Americans included onions, tomatoes, and carrots. Only about a third of the group had bought cucumbers in the past 12 months.