Sizes, packs and counts
Cartons, sacks and consumer bags: pack economics
Potatoes ship wholesale in cartons, sacks, baled consumer bags and 2000 lb bulk totes, and the same potatoes carry different prices by pack. A carton and a sack are quoted per 50 lb package while a tote is quoted per hundredweight, so the raw numbers are not comparable until you put them all on a per-hundredweight basis.
Updated Aug 20, 2026
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Potatoes ship wholesale in a short list of packs, and the pack is part of the price. The 50 lb russet carton, size-graded by count, is the foodservice standard. The 50 lb sack is the bulk workhorse for round reds, yellows and whites. Below them sit baled consumer bags, and above them the bulk tote. Same potatoes, different container, and the market prices each on its own, so the pack is always named next to the number.
The pack menu
Four packs cover most fresh volume. The 50 lb carton is a corrugated box of count-graded bakers, built to protect the potatoes and stack clean. The 50 lb sack, shown by origin in the table above, is a mesh or poly bag, cheaper to pack and the bulk format for rounds. Consumer bags are the small retail units, baled into a 50 lb master, usually ten 5-lb bags or five 10-lb bags to the bale, sold ready for the grocery shelf. The bulk tote is the big one, roughly 2000 pounds of loose potatoes in a bin, the format for buyers moving a lot of volume at once.
Who uses which
Pack maps to the buyer. Foodservice distributors take count cartons because the kitchen orders by potato size. Repackers and high-volume buyers take sacks and totes, because they are cheap per pound and the potatoes are going to be rehandled anyway. Consumer bags are a retail-facing format that prices closer to the store shelf than to the origin market. The same crop feeds all of them, and each pack finds its own price for the same potatoes.
The comparison trap: get to per hundredweight
- Minnesota
- Florida
- Red River Valley
- Virginia
- Wisconsin
- North Carolina
- Delaware
Here is the mistake to avoid. The packs are not quoted on the same basis, so their sticker prices are not comparable. A carton and a sack are priced per 50 lb package, while the bulk tote above is quoted per hundredweight already. A 50 lb package is half a hundredweight, but a 2000 lb tote is twenty of them, so lining up a raw tote number against a raw carton number is a thirty-fold error, not a real price difference. The fix is to put everything on one basis. This site normalizes every pack to a per-hundredweight figure so they compare.
Worked example: three packs, one basis
Take a carton quote, a 50 lb sack quote and a tote quote for comparable potatoes. Double the two 50 lb package prices to reach dollars per hundredweight, since each is half a cwt, and the tote is already there. Now all three are per hundredweight and you can see which pack is dearer and by how much, net of the container. That per-cwt step is the whole trick to reading packs. The raw pack prices were never comparable. The per-hundredweight numbers are.
The Russet Report reports each pack as USDA publishes it, per package for cartons, sacks and bags and per hundredweight for totes, then normalizes every pack to a common per-hundredweight board so they line up.
Try it
Pack weights are the trade's nominal figures: a standard sack is 50 lb, a count carton is also a 50-lb unit, baled consumer bags are sold as 50-lb master units (10×5 lb or 5×10 lb), and bulk totes are commonly 2,000 lb. USDA shipping point prices are quoted per package, so the per-pound figure is the package price divided by its weight; a cwt (hundredweight) price is that figure times 100. This is arithmetic on the numbers you enter, not a quote — actual net weights and freight vary.
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Now look at the live data
Common questions
How much does a bushel of potatoes weigh?
60 pounds. That is the standard US bushel weight for potatoes, which makes a bushel 0.6 of a hundredweight. It matters here because USDA quotes fresh potatoes by the package or by the hundredweight rather than by the bushel, so a bushel figure is always a conversion rather than a published price.
What is the wholesale price of a bushel of potatoes?
Work it off the per-hundredweight quote. Russets are currently quoted at mostly $18.00/50 lb carton ($36.00/cwt) at the shipping point, and a 60 lb bushel is 0.6 of a hundredweight, so a bushel is roughly six tenths of that per-cwt figure before any freight. Russet potato prices carries the live quote by origin.
How much does a 50 lb box of potatoes cost?
mostly $18.00/50 lb carton ($36.00/cwt) for the benchmark count at the shipping point, per USDA. A 50 lb carton is half a hundredweight, which is why the per-cwt figure in that quote is double the per-carton one. The price is FOB at the packing shed and carries no freight.
How do you compare a carton price to a bulk tote price?
Put both on a per-hundredweight basis first. Cartons and 50 lb sacks are quoted per package, and a package is half a hundredweight, so double them. A bulk tote holds roughly 2000 pounds and is already quoted per hundredweight. Comparing the raw sticker numbers instead is a thirty-fold error rather than a real price difference.
What packs do potatoes ship in?
Four cover most fresh volume. The 50 lb carton is the count-graded foodservice box. The 50 lb sack is the mesh or poly bulk format for round reds, yellows and whites. Consumer bags are small retail units baled into a 50 lb master, usually ten 5 lb bags or five 10 lb bags. The bulk tote is roughly 2000 pounds of loose potatoes in a bin.