Grapes and raisins are up there with the best of the fruit. They didn't make the top five, but they'd certainly be in the top ten. But here's my question: why are raisins so much cheaper than grapes?
Ocado has 500g of raisins (made from Californian seedless grapes) available for £0.75. 500g of green, seedless grapes (a juicy and flavoursome grape) cost £1.99.
The bag of raisins will contain way more raisins than the bunch of grapes will grapes—I'd suggest that five times as many would be a conservative estimate. That would make the relative cost of a raisin 7.5% of that of your grape, and it has to go through a longer lifecycle before arriving in your kitchen.
The only two explanations I can think of for the price differential are:
- The time criticality of the grape's sale
- The grape's increased storage requirements.
Both of these suggest that the premium is for the circumstances surrounding their transport, rather than the product itself.
