Avocado oil is having a moment. Browse the aisles of the grocery store and you'll find packaged goods like chips, salad dressings and mayonnaise, all boasting that they're made with avocado oil. But a new study finds that consumers who are paying a premium for these foods are probably not getting what they think they're buying.
And at a time when consumer interest in avocado oil is growing because of its perceived health benefits, the findings add to evidence of widespread fraud in the industry.
"If you're buying avocado oil products, it's very likely that you're not getting what you're paying for," says Selina Wang, a professor of food science at University of California, Davis and the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Applied Food Research.
In the study, Wang and her colleagues purchased 54 products that listed avocado oil as the only oil used and submitted them to chemical analysis. The vast majority – 89% – showed signs of being adulterated with other, cheaper oils, such as soybean oil. She says one sample appeared to have basically no avocado oil in it. And price did not correlate with the authenticity of the oil. (UC Davis has posted the full list of products tested and the results.)
For comparison's sake, the researchers also tested 20 different packaged foods made with olive oil – and only one appeared to show signs of adulteration.
"So this is largely an avocado oil product problem," Wang says.
It's not just packaged foods
She says the findings were disappointing, but not surprising given her past research. In 2020 and 2023, she published studies which found that the bulk of commercially bottled avocado oils were either rancid, meaning they have started to oxidize, or they were adulterated with other oils.
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Since then, a slew of new packaged food products labeled as being made with avocado oil have hit the market. That got her curious about the authenticity of the oil in them, she says, because "I didn't think we had this much avocado oil to go around."
She says the new findings are especially disheartening because avocado oil and products made with it are often significantly more expensive than those made with olive oil and other vegetable oils.
The avocado oil health halo
One reason behind the growing interest in avocado oil and products made with it is because it's often seen as a healthier alternative to seed oils, such as canola, soybean and safflower, says Sarah Berry, a professor of nutrition at King's College London, who has studied the interplay between dietary fats and health. Many nutrition researchers say seed oils have been unfairly maligned.
Berry says while avocado oil is indeed a healthy choice, "where I struggle is the health halo that it's been given."
She says that there's plenty of research showing the health benefits of eating avocados, but there's not a lot of direct evidence on avocado oil.
On the other hand, "we have decades of data showing that extra virgin olive oil is healthy. We have decades of data showing that most seed oils are healthy, whether it's canola oil, sunflower seed oil or soybean oil," Berry says.
Given all that, Berry says it's hard for her to justify paying a markup for products made with avocado oil.
Teresa Fung, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, agrees. "I would rather eat the avocado instead," she says.
Incentives to adulterate
Of course, avocados themselves can be expensive, and they don't yield a whole lot of oil, says Wayne Adams, CEO of the Adams Group, which refines avocado oil in the U.S. and sells it under the brand name Marianne's. That's one big reason why avocado oil tends to be so pricey. Meanwhile, seed oils are so much cheaper.
"You just find people that look at the economic difference and they just see the incentive to adulterate," Wayne says. He'd like to see more regulatory action on the issue of adulterated oil in the industry. Ultimately he says, that would help his business not get undercut by cheaters.
Adulteration of premium cooking oils to maximize profits has been going on for decades, says Eric Decker, a food science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose research focuses on fats and oils.
"For a period of time, olive oil would be adulterated with hazelnut oil because their fatty acid compositions were very similar," Decker notes. "But then hazelnut wholesale became very expensive."
Decker, Adams and Wang all say it's not clear where in the supply chain the adulteration may be taking place. But Wang says she hopes her findings help spur the industry to act.
In fact, Wang first made headlines a decade and a half ago with a study that found many imported extra-virgin olive oils failed to meet quality and purity standards. Those findings brought attention to the problem and since then, testing indicates there's been a lot of improvement in the olive oil industry, Wang says.
In a statement to NPR, the board members of the Avocado Oil Manufacturers Association – Enrique García Gavira, Miraj Shah and Lia Bijnsdorp – said the international group was founded last year precisely to address these authenticity challenges in their young, rapidly growing industry.
"We are learning from olive oil, which faced similar problems until the creation of an international council and shared standards helped restore consumer confidence," the group said. "Avocado oil must follow the same path, and that journey is now underway."
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