The Latest Five-Year Evaluation of the Hass Avocado Boards Promotion Programs 2018-2022

The Hass Avocado Promotion, Research, and Information Act and Order that created the Hass Avocado Board, instructed that HAB undertake a five-year evaluation every five years they are operating, HAB in early 2023 engaged with a group of professors and graduate students in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University Of California at Davis, to do this economic evaluation of our Research & Promotion activity.

Having been created in 2002, this is the 4th such five-year evaluation that HAB has undertaken, to evaluate the strength, the value creation, and the return on investment that the industry is getting in return for the investment of assessments that industry members are required to pay under the rules of the program.

Professor Rich Sexton, Associate Professor Kristin Kiesel, and Ph. D. students Jiawei Guo, and Stamatina Kotsakou gathered, analyzed and wrote a detailed account of the work that the Hass Avocado Board, and the member associations performed over the course of the five years covered by the evaluation.

The report is an insightful document that looks at the work of all five associations (California Avocado Commission, Colombian Avocado Board, the Chilean Avocado Importers Association, Avocados from Mexico, and the Peruvian Avocado Commission), who keep and invest 85% of the assessments collected, as well as the work done directly by the Hass Avocado Board with the 15% of the assessments that it keeps, driving demand in the U.S. marketplace.

The conclusion is that the work of all six of the organizations involved in the demand growing business for the avocado industry created value and a return on investment of 2.47 for every dollar invested into the category. In other words, the industry stakeholders, the producers and the importers who pay the assessment dollar under the law of the HAPRIO garnered a $2.47 dollar return on every dollar they invested into the program.

Furthermore, the report concluded that the demand expansion has enabled producer prices to be sustained in real terms, and even increase on average, through the life of the Hass Avocado Board. This while volume of avocados has increased by over 260% since the program was initiated in 2002. While the total fruit category only grew by 9% during this time period.

The Hass Avocado Board, and its fellow associations would like to thank the esteemed professors at UC Davis for undertaking this evaluation, and for once again finding that the work of all of the boards is driving demand and category growth for all players in the supply chain.

The full report is available at the HAB website:

View the Report Here