Best time to buy foods price / flavor

[the_fixer]

We are looking to buy items in bulk and package them for use throughout the year to save money and get the items at the peak of flavor.

For example sweet corn is cheap and tastes amazing around summer, asparagus is cheap and good quality in the spring, I always see turkey on sale at thanksgiving/ Christmas as well as chuck roast.

What is the best time to buy items to get them at their peak of quality and at the lowest cost?

US based in Colorado but imagine there is overlap for example apples, berries come from further away but there has to be a season / sweet spot to buy them.

We will be vacuum packing and plan to do it in large quantities


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[slow hand slow plan]

Tomatoes and squash in fall , August. Ham after Christmas and Easter. apples summer July, palisade peaches in the fall. Not much else i can think of...

[the_fixer]

Just thought of another one corned beef and cabbages around St Patrick’s day are always cheap.

Thanks for the reminder on the palisade peaches love them and they are somewhat local.

Maybe @APowers can thrown down some ideas he is the sale master


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[littleturkey]

I suppose you could check out a gardening guide and see when things grow locally.  But remember that the things in the grocery stores aren't necessarily going to be super fresh, either.  For example, beans are growing in mid-summer.  But the grocery store beans could be from thousands of miles away.  Your best bet for local freshness is a farmer's market, though in my experience that can cost a lot more.

Once while living in TX I saw a man on the side of the road selling peaches out of his truck.  I bought a big box of them, thinking it was a farmer selling his crops (this was in an area where a lot of peach farms are).  When I got home I noticed that they had Georgia stickers on them.  Bummer.

[BrightFIRE]

https://www.seasonalfoodguide.org/ Put in your state and the produce you want to check.

Generally, green/leafy things are spring, berries are summer, melons and stone fruit are summer, grapes, apples & pears are fall, citrus is winter. July-September is when there's more stuff in season than you can keep up with.

But all of those can be changed by use of greenhouses, geography, local weather patterns, etc (a cool spring can push back all these dates). I don't think meat availability is seasonal anymore, now it's tied to holidays and "grilling season".

But this is also talking about local. I got some awesome grapes from Aldi in the spring last year, because it was fall in South America, where the grapes were coming from. When I used to live in Florida, February was strawberry season.