The avocado industry has been chasing 3 billion pounds of annual production or import for years now. It didn’t make it in 2024, but there’s hope the goal is in reach for 2025.
The Hass Avocado Board released its 2024 Year in Review report May 25. In it, the board highlighted several trends in the U.S. avocado industry — key among these being five years of flat production and smaller fruit — as well as tallying up where the industry is and where it will go in the near future.
“Overall, volume stagnated flat, going from 2.860 billion pounds in 2023 to 2.878 billion pounds in 2024, an increase of less than 1%,” the report said. “It’s the fifth year in a row that volume has been between 2.588 and 2.878 billion pounds, a streak that many hope to break in 2025 and finally get over the 3-billion-pound mark the industry has had on its radar screen since 2019.”
The report also summarized California’s production and avocado export countries’ volumes shipped into the U.S. in 2024 as follows:
- Mexico — 2.311 billion pounds, down 5% from its 2023 level of 2.435 billion pounds.
- California — 337 million pounds, up sharply (58%) from its surprisingly low 2023 volume of 213 million pounds.
- Peru — 137 million pounds, relatively flat compared to 2023.
- Colombia — 68 million pounds, over double the 2023 volume of 30 million pounds.
- Chile — 12 million pounds, also relatively flat compared to 2023.
Trend No. 1: Flat avocado production worldwide
John McGuigan, HAB director of industry affairs, told The Packer there are two main drivers of the flat production seen in avocado-producing countries: weather and grove age.
“Weather patterns have definitely changed,” he said. “Peru will tell you that the last couple of years were El Niño-driven and that’s why they had smaller crops and smaller sizes.” Mexico provides another example.
“The rainy seasons and the amount of rain down in Mexico, in Michoacan, is completely different,” he added, noting that Mexico produces roughly 85% of the avocados consumed in the U.S. Michoacan is Mexico’s primary avocado growing region, and a majority of the orchards there are completely rain-fed, making changes in precipitation patterns a problem.
“Mexico is having some issues with their productivity, and they have to increase their technological skills in the orchards if we’re ever going to get to 3.3 or 3.4 [billion pounds], which we believe is very doable on the demand side in the U.S.,” McGuigan said.
Grove age is also a productivity concern for Mexico and beyond, he said.
“A lot of the groves were put in in [Mexico, California and Chile] during the ’70s and the ’80s,” McGuigan explained. And older trees are not as productive.
Trend No. 2: Smaller avocados
Older trees also produced smaller fruit.
“Fruit from almost all origins trended smaller than ‘normal’ again for almost all of 2024, as Mexico, California, Colombia and even Peru, which historically had the largest size curve in our industry, had smaller-than-average fruit to bring to market,” the HAB report said. “Volumes for ’40s & 48s, the retail bread & butter of the industry, dropped by almost 30% during the course of 2024, while small fruit grew by 9.5%.”
“I think the industry needs to keep an eye on this phenomenon and this trend,” McGuigan said.
Both he and the report noted that, thus far, retailers have bagged the smaller avocados and seen good success there. McGuigan said the volume of bagged avocados has grown aggressively since COVID to now being about 25% of all of the sales of avocados, a trend led by Costco and Walmart.
But more needs to be done, McGuigan said.
“If we are moving into more and more and more small fruit, the industry is going to have to do something more innovative than just putting them in bags and hoping the consumer is going to pick them up,” he said.
2025 and beyond
Looking to the future, McGuigan said that Americans — who already buy half of the world’s avocados — would “absolutely buy more” if there were more to buy.
Expectations for the 2025 avocado crop stand at just around 3 billion pounds — where they’ve been, though unrealized, for the past several years — according to McGuigan. The following crop in 2026 will likely be roughly the same, but both California and Colombia are the places to watch for growth farther out. HAB expects about 150 million pounds from Colombia, for example, a steep increase compared to 2024’s 68 million pounds.
McGuigan said Europe is Colombia’s main avocado market. But as Peru, which already has a lot of the European market, sends more of its avocado production to Europe, there will be more opportunity for Colombian avocados to come to the U.S.
“The issue right now for Colombia is they have to get orchards registered with a government entity, with a work plan, before they can bring it into the U.S.,” McGuigan said. That has been a slow process, but one that is improving.
“It would not surprise me to see 300 or 350 million pounds from Colombia three or four years from now,” he said.
Closer to home, the projections for California production are strong.
“I’ve heard estimates from people that, five years from now, California could be 600 million pounds. It could be big,” McGuigan said.
The potential growth in California’s avocado production will be due to two main things: new trees and more orchards. On the one hand, there have been a lot of new avocado trees planted in the wake of the Thomas Fire that tore through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in 2017.
On the other hand, new avocado orchards are going in replacing lemons. McGuigan said that lemons have been struggling for several years now because they are globally overproduced.
“So, a lot of that lemon production is going out and avocados are going in,” he said. “There’s going to be a little bit of a rebirth with California becoming a bigger player.”
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