Where America’s Avocados Come From: The 2025 Numbers by Country
Where do most avocados come from? The grocery store, of course. That is the joke answer, and for most shoppers it is the only answer they ever need. But behind the bin in the produce aisle is a supply chain that stretches across six countries, and the numbers are worth a look.
As of the end of August 2025, the tally we read out in the video came to about 1.9 billion pounds of avocados so far that year, and one country accounted for most of it.
The 2025 numbers, through August
- Mexico: 1.3 billion pounds
- California: 277 million pounds
- Peru: 185 million pounds
- Colombia: 110 million pounds
- Chile: 12 million pounds
- Dominican Republic: 8 million pounds
Add them up and you get roughly 1.9 billion pounds picked by the end of August.
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What the numbers say about California
Run the arithmetic on those figures and California’s 277 million pounds works out to a little under 15 percent of the total. Mexico’s 1.3 billion is about two-thirds. Everyone else, combined, makes up the rest.
That lines up with something we say often: California grows the large majority of the avocados grown in the United States, yet most of the avocados Americans eat are imported. (Southern Florida and Hawaii grow avocados too, but mostly tropical West Indian types, because Hass does not fruit and grow well there.) We wrote more about the difference in California vs imported avocados.
Why the supply chain looks like this
Part of it is seasons. California Hass has a season, and when our fruit is done, somebody else’s is coming on. The UC growers’ handbook puts the Hass harvest at roughly January through August in San Diego County, running as late as October in the cooler northern counties like Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Mexico can supply much of the year, and the southern-hemisphere countries like Peru and Chile fill in at different times. That is how a store can have avocados in every month.
Part of it is scale and cost. A small California grove competes on price with fruit grown where land, water and labor cost far less. We have laid out what is behind the price on the shelf, and the broader picture of what it really costs to run a California avocado farm.
Why is Chile’s number so small?
Chile has been a much bigger supplier than 12 million pounds suggests. Timing is probably part of the answer. Chilean growers have shipped Hass to the U.S. in the fall and winter since 1985, so a tally that stops at the end of August would miss much of their season. In the winter of 2002-03 alone, Chile shipped about 157 million pounds of Hass to the U.S., which the handbook notes was more than a third of California’s Hass crop at the time.
Peru is a newer arrival. It began shipping Hass into the U.S. in 2011 with late-summer fruit.
How long have imported avocados been in U.S. stores?
Not as long as you might think. In 1914 the USDA quarantined avocados from Mexico and Central America to keep out seed weevils and stem borers, and that quarantine stayed fully in place until 1997.
- 1997: a USDA rule tied to NAFTA let Hass from certified pest-free areas of Mexico into 19 northeastern states and Washington, D.C., from November through February only.
- 2001: the rule widened to 31 states, with the season extended through April 15.
- 2001 world picture: Mexico was already the world’s largest producer, at about 940,000 tons, but its own domestic market took most of that fruit.
Those are figures from the early 2000s, in a handbook published in 2013. This year’s 1.3 billion pounds from Mexico shows how far things have moved since. We traced what those trade changes did to growers like us in the rise and fall of the avocado co-op.
Where we fit in
Our grove in Escondido is a tiny slice of that 277 million pounds. We are not trying to compete with a billion-pound supply chain. What we can do is pick to order, ship the week we pick, and let you know exactly whose trees your fruit came from.
Have other avocado questions? Leave them on the video and we will try to answer them. And if you want your share of that California number to come from our trees, our 4lb and 6lb Hass boxes ship free in season, with a waitlist on each page for the months in between. Until the trees are picking again, the avocado scoop, the Hawaiian shirt and our hats ship year-round.
