You’ll be hearing about the benefits of “an avocado a day” in the future if Hass Avocado Board’s new five-year strategic plan bears fruit.
The Mission Viejo-based marketing board—which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and charged with pushing the Hass variety of the thick-skinned green fruit—wants nothing short of making it the new apple by 2021.
The coming emphasis on consumer preferences reflects a new ambition with a clear and quantifiable target.
“Our vision in the past was strictly about industry stakeholders being successful and profitable and building sustainable demand,” said Executive Director Emiliano Escobedo. “Now we want to be the No. 1 consumed fruit in the United States.”
The Hass Avocado Board was set up in 2002 to promote the consumption of avocados. It collects an assessment from domestic Hass producers—all based in California according to the group—and about 150 importers around the U.S. The assessment comes to about 2.5 cents for each pound of fresh avocados sold on the market.
The board distributes 85% of the money to various associations representing growers’ and importers’ interests, including the Irvine-based California Avocado Commission, the Mexican Hass Avocado Import Association, the Peruvian Avocado Commission and the Chilean Avocado Import Association.
The trade groups have to use the funds to market their avocados in the U.S.
The $45.4 million the board collected last year was split according to the avocado volume its stakeholders sold. California Avocado Commission, which represents some 3,400 growers in the state contributing 261 million pounds of fruit last year, received $5.5 million. The production output included about 8 million pounds from Irvine Company’s approximately 1,100 acres near the Portola Springs and Orchard Hills developments. Mexican Hass Avocado Import Association got $37.3 million to promote avocados from Mexico, which have about an 80% share of the 2.1 billion pound U.S. market.
The Hass Avocado Board retains 15% of the assessment to promote the overall avocado industry, regardless of the origin of the fruit, Escobedo said. He anticipates the board will collect $58.8 million this year, which allows it to keep about $8.8 million. Some $5.6 million is earmarked for marketing initiatives, up from $4.9 million last year.
It works with several advertising and public relations agencies, including Grupo Gallegos in Huntington Beach for digital and social media work; Sterling-Rice Group in Boulder, Colo., for creative work; and FoodMinds LLC in Chicago for health marketing.
Its public relations efforts are handled by PadillaCRT and MSLGROUP, both in New York.
Apples and bananas are currently America’s favorite fresh fruits—consumers spent an average of $27 on apples in 2013, the latest USDA data available. Strawberries came in second at $18.
Bananas led on volume, with 28.1 pounds consumed per capita, followed by melons at 25.3 pounds and apples at 17.4 pounds.
Avocados have some way to go, with current U.S. consumption at 2 pounds and expenditure at $14 per year. The Hass Avocado Board’s goal is for annual per capita consumption to be at 14 pounds, or about $28 by 2021. Its new strategic plan to knock apples off their pedestal was derived from an “industry-wide issues forum, including a supply chain survey (and) a series of one-on-one interviews” with “influential avocado players from around the world,” according to Chris Henry, the board’s chairman.
The plan has six focus areas, including ongoing support for demand increase. The board’s data shows that some 56% of households nationwide are “heavy” and “super heavy” users that consume more than 37 avocados per year and account for about 80% of the total volume sold.
“The opportunity to get [the rest of the] households to eat more is huge,” he said. “A lot of them don’t know how to select a ripe avocado, how to cut it, how to store it, what else to do beyond guacamole or putting it in salad. So we think we have an opportunity to grow demand considerably.”
The plan also focuses on increasing the number of producers and importers that pay the assessment, furthering nutrition research and affairs, supply-and-demand data collection, and exploring sustainability solutions.
Emphasis on quality, meanwhile, has shifted from research to implementing best handling practices throughout the supply chain.
“Our goal is to help the industry become very knowledgeable and also from a procedural standpoint be consistent about how avocados are handled so that the consumer at the end has that confidence that it doesn’t matter where the avocado was produced, what time of the year, where they are buying it, it’s going to be a great-tasting avocado,” Escobedo said. “And that’s a huge challenge … because you’re moving 4 billion avocados.”
