Crawfish Season Heats Up

By Ian McNulty and Timothy Boone

The Advocate

Crawfish growers may look to the rain gauges or the temperature to forecast the supply end of the Louisiana harvest.

But Jason Seither, who boils and sells tons of the mudbugs each year at his Harahan restaurant Seither's Seafood, looks to the local social customs that dictate the annual swell in demand. He knows it's about to rev up.

''As soon as that first Mardi Gras float goes down St. Charles Avenue, that's when everyone wants crawfish,'' Seither said. ''Super Bowl weekend is always a really big. And then there's Valentine's Day, because those Louisiana girls love crawfish just as much as they love roses.''

From the vantage of his screened-in boiling room, Seither said the season is shaping up strong.

''They're a decent size for this time of year, they're full of fat and we're getting plenty of them,'' Seither said.

The restaurant is selling crawfish for $6.99 a pound, and he expects that to drop in the weeks ahead (full-service restaurant prices generally run higher than markets). But predicting price can be tricky.

''Right now, dealers are trying to sell me more than I can handle. But when the season really gets going, and I'm ordering 25 sacks a day instead of five and everyone wants them, the prices can change. It's supply and demand in its purest form,'' Seither said.

Laney King, co-founder of The Crawfish App, which tracks retail prices at more than 1,600 locations, said prices have dropped dramatically in recent weeks. In mid-January, the tasty crustaceans were selling at average of $5.67 per

pound, nearly $2 a pound more than live crawfish cost the same time a year earlier.

But King said the price dropped about $1.50 over the past two weeks. Medium-sized live crawfish are now selling between $3.50 to $3.99 a pound. That's actually about 40 cents cheaper than a year ago.

''What happened was prices started off really high and consumers refused to purchase them,'' she said. ''So, the supply went up.''

The reason for the higher crawfish prices, like what is going on with so many other food items, is inflation.

Mark Shirley, a crawfish specialist with LSU AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant, said bait and labor costs have gone up substantially. Two years ago, a 50-pound box of crawfish bait cost about 60 cents a pound. Now, it sells for between 80 to 85 cents a pound. And labor costs have gone up $1.50 an hour.

''All around, production costs have gone up,'' he said.

David Savoy, a crawfish farmer in Church Point and chair of the Louisiana Crawfish Promotion and Research Board, said his insurance premiums have increased by 30% to 40%.

The high prices and low demand have caused some crawfish farmers to sit at home and wait for the demand to turn around.

''The number of people that haven't harvested any crawfish in the last two weeks is ungodly,'' he said.

Savoy said he believes demand for crawfish will pick up soon, especially with the Super Bowl happening next weekend.

''We go through this every time of the year, where we outproduce what people want, but I don't know if I've ever seen it this bad,'' he said.

At the seafood market Bevi Seafood in Mid-City New Orleans, owner Justin LeBlanc said crawfish had ''a terrible start.'' As recently as December, he was charging $9 a pound for boiled crawfish, which he said didn't sit well with him but was the price he needed to meet his margin.

''That's just how it goes. If you want crawfish before Mardi Gras, you're going to have to pay for it,'' LeBlanc said. ''But now the ship has righted itself; we're back to the standard. I think it's going to be a good season.''

Bevi is now selling crawfish for $4.99 a pound. And on a sunny Friday morning, the shop was selling a lot of it.

Lofton Fairchild, owner of local contractor Elite Air Systems, came in for a 30-pound order to bring back to his crew at a job site.

''It's a beautiful day, so I'm bringing them lunch and we can all eat outside,'' Lofton said.

That speaks to another powerful dynamic for the crawfish market.

''I'm sure there's no other food business affected by the weather as much as crawfish,'' LeBlanc said. ''If it's a nice pretty day, we'll triple the volume and that's purely weather-related. No one looks at the weather more than me.''

The cold fronts that have been happening frequently since Christmas have reduced the supply of crawfish. When the weather is cold, crawfish don't move much, so the catch goes down. And it takes a couple of sunny days in a row to increase water temperatures enough that they move around.

That's going to set the season back and prices will be higher than last year, said Anthony Arceneaux, owner of Hawk Crawfish Restaurant in Rayne, which is renowned for its boiled seafood.

''This season is going to be a bit challenging,'' Arceneaux said.

At Crawfish Acadiana, a Lafayette business that opened last week, boiled crawfish is selling for $6.20 per pound. Owners Chelsie and Kennon Wilson offer farm-totable freshly boiled crawfish.

''Sometimes, people go farm to wholesale to table. (We're) squeezing that middleman out. If you buy from wholesale, you may be too high for the public,'' Kennon Wilson said.

At Hole 'N Da Wall Seafood, owner Jacob Landry said he reopened his Port Vincent business for crawfish season last weekend and sold 7,500 pounds of crawfish, above what he did in 2022.

''The crawfish for January were not terrible. I've seen better and I've seen worse,'' said Landry, whose family has a background in commercial fishing and wholesale crawfish sales. ''But I'm looking forward for the next few months and prices coming down.''

Contributing writer Stephen Marcantel contributed to this report.

Email Ian McNulty at imcnulty@theadvocate.com.