LAFAYETTE, La. — April 14, 2014 — Louisiana crawfishermen and the merchants who sell the crustacean to retail customers say the supply should be enough to satisfy appetites during Holy Week and Easter weekend, a welcome turn to a season marred by a harsh winter that stunted crawfish growth, limited the catch and made profit forecasts bleak.
In the days leading into Holy Week, prices for a pound of live crawfish ran from $2 at Db Seafood in Morgan City to $2.49 at Tony’s Seafood Market and Deli in Baton Rouge. The price was somewhere in between at D&T Seafood in Abbeville, where live, small-sized crawfish sold for $1.50 a pound and the mediums went for $2.25.
“We’re going to have a decent supply” for Easter week, said D&T owner Don Benoit.
A boiled batch of crawfish this past week cost $4.98 to $4.70 per pound for the large-sized at D&T Seafood, a serving that includes potatoes and corn. At Db Seafood, it was $3 a pound but without potatoes and corn. At Tony’s, customers paid $3.69 a pound, but it didn’t come with the extras.
It was slow going for months, Tony’s co-owner Bill Pizzolato said, but supplies have improved enough to pull prices down 50 cents per pound over the past week.
“We don’t know what Easter week (prices) are going to be,” Pizzolato said, explaining that heightened demand in the next eight days should drive up prices. “Next week, we’ll just have to see what happens, when we’ll see what the volume of crawfish coming in is.”