Iceberg Lettuce and Power Prices

While facing the highest price level of power and gas prices in Australia’s history, it was thought we could all do with a little bit of light-heartedness.

For some reason we thought we would check how iceberg lettuce prices have moved over time, because they seem to be drawing lots of attention. We found over the period of Nov-21 to Jul-22 that the wholesale carton iceberg lettuce prices have behaved so similar to the NSW forward power prices for 2023. The correlation between the two factors is a staggering 0.94.

The chart below shows the weekly wholesale carton iceberg lettuce prices mapped against the NSW forward price for 2023, and it is uncanny how similar they have behaved.

Our team spends a lot of time developing, maintaining, and applying our probabilistic spot and forward price modelling system, but when you look at this uncanny relationship, we may need to spend more time understanding iceberg lettuce prices?

The lettuce prices were sourced from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry; while the NSW forward prices are sourced from the closing ASX Energy prices.