Texas Residents Paying Crazy Prices For Crawfish

The 2024 crawfish season is here and in Louisiana, we are spoiled to have an abundance of supply and usually pretty low prices for crawfish especially after Lent starts. In the first part of any crawfish season, the prices are usually on the steeper side as they are just coming out but usually get better around the March to June time frame.

In Louisiana, we see prices in the $7 to $9 range at the beginning of the season but then they level off to around $3 to $6 a pound for cooked. Live sacks of crawfish in Louisiana later in the season go down to the $2 to maybe $3 a pound range.

Now in Texas, it's a whole other story. Louisiana folk's jaws are dropping to see what restaurants in Texas are charging and the price that Texas residents are willing to pay for the Cajun delight.

In past years, Texas residents would pay $8 to 9 dollars a pound for crawfish but not this year in 2024.

Right now if you are in Texas and want crawfish, restaurants are charging $13.99 to $15.99 a pound. If you want to boil them yourself, you will pay upwards of $11 to 12 dollars a pound for a sack of crawfish.

So do the math, most sacks of live crawfish average around 30 pounds a sack so if you pay $12 a pound for one sack, it will cost you $360 for one sack of live crawfish in Texas. That's crazy!

The reason? Supplies are so limited this season due to the severe drought Louisiana Crawfish farmers experienced last Summer in 2023 and coupled that with salt that was found in the soil which killed a ton of the crop. The freezing weather we just had doesn't help either.

Louisiana is even seeing higher than normal prices in 2024 as well. We have seen some for $9 to $10 a pound so far in January of 2024.