The American Pecan Council Released its December 2018 pecan position report yesterday and the numbers show some mixed signals.

The US pecan industry began releasing the long awaited pecan data from the American Pecan Council back in September of 2018 on a monthly basis. Now the US pecan industry can better track supply and demand for American pecans a well as the Mexican pecan imports into the US. The pecan data released for December 2018 was less encouraging than the previous months for total shipments but was quite encouraging when looking at the commitments to ship.

Total pecan shipments for the month of December were at 10,789,230 lbs, down 68.83% from the previous months 34,617,917 lbs. The biggest decrease was in the In-shell pecan shipments which stands at (4,829,238), yes you read that correctly, negative 4.8 million pounds. In-shell pecan shipments dropped a whopping 259% from the previous month, while shelled pecan shipments dropped 68% from the previous month, from 15.7 million to 7.8 million pounds.

A bright spot in the data is the “commitments to ship”. The total commitments to ship for December stands at 135,285,652 lbs (converted to In-shell) which is up 15.6% from the prior month at 117,040,540, which is up 22.3% from the prior month.

Digging a little further into the data reveals that the large majority of commitments to ship is dominated by domestic commitments here in the US. As the APC releases more data throughout the year we will be able to get a more accurate picture of the domestic demand being created by the marketing efforts.

*NOTE- “Commitments to ship” data does not include the deduct for “contracts to purchase.” The purpose of this is to view the data without consideration of contracts to purchase data as viewed in the APC totals.