Bad news for your Fourth of July sheet cake.
It’s getting to be damn near impossible to find the cult favorite, massively expensive strawberry brand, Harry’s Berries. The scarcity has some fans panicked we’re headed into a strawberry shortage on par in severity and devastation with the infamous rosé shortage of 2014.
The California-based organic berry company has a celebrity following and a rabid fan base, who can’t get enough of the sugary sweet Gaviota and Seascape-variety strawberries — even though they sell for as much as $15 per container.
Super fans will obsessively tell you that the company painstakingly plucks their berries every five days, giving them longer than usual to become ripe and perfect — and that they may actually change your life.
“They taste like they’ve been injected with sugar,” actress Kristen Bell recently gushed to Popsugar. “Every time someone comes over and tries one for the first time, they have an audible reaction.”
Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart also is a long-time champion of Harry’s Berries’ “dedication to raising food that is free of synthetic chemicals.”
But it seems their deliciousness may be their downfall: just last week, regular Harry’s customer Lauren Fonda looked for the berries at Eli Zabar’s in Grand Central Market and to her dismay, “I didn’t see them,” says the Westchester resident who works in branding.
“I would be upset…they taste like what the ideal strawberry should taste like,” Fonda says.
The prospect of a shortage has her and others feeling worried — and hungry, says Mike Winik, the co-founder of OurHarvest, an online farmer’s market that delivers the berries in the city.
“They sell out within within minutes to an hour,” Winik says. He usually has to offer a wait list for the berries, which regularly accumulate “hundreds” of hungry buyers — who often snatch up as many as 10 containers in fear of missing out on the next shipment. When his company received a smashed shipment of the berries, they were too precious to throw away, so he teamed up with Il Laboratorio Del Gelato on a strawberry gelato, which he expects to sell equally fast.
“There is a crazy, crazy demand,” he says.
Though the berry company has been operational for about 30 years, the little guys weren’t available in New York until recently, and immediately became a big deal on sites like Winik’s, FoodKick and Baldor.
Even before that, once chefs here got wind of their juicy sweetness, they relied on distributors to ship them to New York, says Kerry Clasby who supplied the berries to superstar chefs and restaurateurs Mario Batali, David Bouley and Tom Colicchio.
Clasby, known as the Intuitive Forager on Instagram, works closely with the Oxnard, Calif. farm assures The Post that if there’s a shortage in New York, it will only be short term.
“There’s no problem with Harry’s Berries — they are flourishing,” she says, adding that the supply may have dipped recently because of last year’s fires, followed by an unusually heavy amount of rain in the drought-prone state.
“It’s just temporary — they’ll still be coming through,” she says.
Still, with the farm not increasing supply or the size of their fields amid a booming demand, it’s surely not going to get any easier to find the berries, Winik says.
“There is a limited number they send east,” he says. “And now, the home customer is competing with the chefs.”
So is this the last straw for the fruit’s following?
“To be honest,” says Molly Lucas, a Brooklyn Heights resident who gets her berries on FoodKick, “The scarcity is a lot of the appeal for me.”