The Super El Niño Is Coming. Here's Where it Lands at the Grocery Checkout

Personal note: Even the Supermarket Guru needs a week off the shelves. The Lempert Report is taking a break next week - the week of August 24th - vacation time! We'll be back to our regular Tuesday/Friday schedule starting September 1st. If anything big breaks while I'm out, don't worry—I'll write it up and get it to you that week regardless.

A storm in Florida is not a weather story—it is a tomato problem. A drought in California is not a climate statistic—it is a lettuce problem. And when the Pacific Ocean heats up, as it is doing now, the consequences eventually arrive on a supermarket shelf, usually with a higher price tag.

On June 11, 2026, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center did something worth paying attention to: it upgraded the official U.S. ENSO status from El Niño Watch to El Niño Advisory, and the forecasting consensus points to conditions that could persist through the 2026–27 winter. El Niño is here, and NOAA now puts the odds of it persisting through winter 2026-27 at 96 to 98%, with roughly a 63% chance it reaches “very strong,” which is even troubling becoming a Super El Niño.

But before we declare a grocery-price apocalypse, a reminder: El Niño is not a light switch. It does not raise the price of every food in every aisle, and its local effects are never perfectly predictable. The much-hyped 2015–16 event, for example, did not deliver precisely the California soaking many expected. Still, food retailers, suppliers, restaurant operators and consumers should pay attention. El Niño is not simply an ocean-temperature story. It is a system wide problem from the Pacific to the farm, to the river barge, to the diesel tank, to the checkout lane. The farmers I’m talking to I’ve talked to about this cycle are telling me the same thing. To plan for the range of outcomes, not the headline.

Let’s start with the foods we don’t grow enough of here, because most of the crops most exposed to El Niño aren’t grown in the Midwest or California they’re grown in West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Chocolate is especially at risk. Cocoa has been under pressure from poor harvests and tight supplies, and West Africa, particularly Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, accounts for the bulk of global production. El Niño historically brings hotter and drier conditions to parts of that region, precisely the conditions cocoa trees do not need. Every strong El Niño in the last 55 years has reduced global cocoa production. Cocoa recently crossed $5,000 a ton, with Citi analysts calling for $6,000. Early field surveys out of the Ivory Coast are already showing below-average pod counts for the crop for this October’s harvest. I’ve written before about how a bad harvest today doesn’t hit the candy bars on supermarket shelves for months and that’s exactly the dynamic playing out again.

Coffee is another concern, especially robusta beans from Vietnam and Indonesia - the world’s largest and third-largest producers which tend to get hotter and drier during El Niño, right when their crops are developing. Sugar is getting hit from two directions at once: drought risk in India and Thailand, and Brazilian mills are diverting cane toward ethanol when the economics make that more profitable. Palm oil, rice, bananas, tea are at risk to the weather shocks across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

California’s Central Valley grows roughly a third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit, and El Niño puts that region in a genuinely strange position as it can bring drought relief and flood risk in the very same winter. Too much rain, arriving too quickly, can flood fields, interrupt harvests, damage roads and delay trucks. Too little rain, or rain at the wrong point in a crop’s growing cycle, does not solve the problem. Research on past events shows a silver lining for some Valley staples: avocados and almonds tend to see improved yields with El Niño-linked rainfall, and grapes, stone fruit, and pistachios can benefit too, if the timing cooperates. The truth is that we can’t control the weather and timing, geography and field conditions matter.

In the 2015-16 El Nino, wholesale cauliflower more than tripled, from around $20 a case to $60. Green onions jumped from roughly $13-14 a pound to $40-$50 for restaurant buyers. Mexican asparagus supply dropped by 80% overall as the cooler El Nino temperatures delayed planting. These are just examples of what could happen.

Florida’s winter vegetable belt is even more exposed. A Journal of Climate study found that Florida tomato, bell pepper, sweet corn, and snap bean yields drop in El Niño winters, and prices for bell pepper and snap bean rise specifically because of it. The 2015-16 season gave us the real-world version: farm-level tomato prices jumped from $35.80 to $108 per hundredweight between September 2015 and January 2016, as Florida shipments nearly cut in half.

There’s also an important compounding factor in Florida that doesn’t get enough attention about the relationship between climate and citrus greening. The disease itself is bacterial, but it travels on the back of the Asian citrus psyllid, and that insect’s range is climate-sensitive, it thrives between 60 and 90°F, and researchers at the University of Florida and Virginia Tech have found that a warming climate will let it keep expanding into territory that used to be too cool for it. Rainfall compounds the risk too research out of Brazil found HLB incidence rises with higher rainfall, which is exactly the kind of wetter winter El Niño tends to deliver to Florida. To put it all in perspective, Florida orange production has dropped from 224 million boxes in 1998 to 12 million boxes in 2024. A wet, warm El Niño winter is the kind of season that gives the psyllid more room to work to destroy even more orange groves.

Most coverage of climate and food prices stops at the farm gate. That misses a major part of the story: how food moves, nobody seems to be writing about the barge!

The Mississippi River system carries 92% of U.S. agricultural exports and 78% of feed grains and soy. A single 15-barge tow hauls the equivalent of two and a quarter unit trains, or 870 semi-trucks. When that river runs low, as it has in recent drought years, everything backs up. Barges have to carry less cargo and freights costs rise. The 2022 drought cut Louisiana agricultural exports by 3.9%, cost the sector $563.9 million, and hit wheat exports hardest of all. Freight rates out of St. Louis ran 77% above the three-year average during the worst of it.

Here’s the twist: El Niño winters tend to bring wetter conditions to the Gulf and the South, which could actually ease the low-water barge problem that’s plagued the last few harvest seasons. Too much can go wrong between now and next spring to hope that does happen, but it’s a genuine possibility. That is why simplistic “El Niño equals higher food prices” headlines are not useful. The real issue is the volatility that makes planning uncertain.

We’re heading into this event with 47.4 million food-insecure Americans already on the books, with the lowest-income households already spending close to 30% of their budgets on food, and with Congress still debating further SNAP cuts. Beef prices were already projected to rise 6.3% in 2026 before anyone put El Niño into the model. And if the Peruvian anchoveta fishery takes the kind of hit it took in 1997-98 which is entirely plausible in a Super El Niño year, fishmeal costs ripple straight into farmed fish, poultry, and hog feed. All this increases the odds that retailers and manufacturers will pay more to secure supply, move inventory and manage disruption. And that certainly translates to higher prices for shoppers.

The most vulnerable categories are likely to include:

• Chocolate and cocoa-based products

• Coffee, particularly robusta-heavy blends and instant coffee

• Sugar and sugar-intensive packaged foods

• Tomatoes and Florida winter vegetables

• Bell peppers, snap beans, cauliflower and green onions

• Palm-oil-based packaged products

• Rice, bananas and tea

• Wheat, if drought pressure builds in the Plains

• Poultry, pork and farmed seafood if feed costs rise

• Beef, which is already facing an elevated price environment before any El Niño effect is added

This isn’t a one-crop story, and it’s not a one-season story either. It underscores the fact that we need to take a hard look at how and where we grow our foods. Climate change is real and affects every shopper at the checkout. The risk from a powerful El Niño is not that every item suddenly becomes unaffordable. The greater danger is a new wave of uneven, unpredictable cost increases layered onto a food economy where consumers are already worn down by price fatigue. For retailers, this is the time to revisit sourcing plans, strengthen supplier communication, identify vulnerable ingredients and be honest with shoppers about what is happening. For consumers, it is a reminder that food prices are increasingly shaped by forces far beyond the supermarket aisle.

Thanks for reading The Lempert Report and be back in your mailbox September 1st!

A behind-the-scenes note: I use AI tools to help with research, tagging, proofreading, and fact-checking on The Lempert Report. The take is always mine - 40 years in this industry doesn’t come from a prompt!