How the Hass Avocado Took Over the World
The ancient Mexican dietary staple turned Instagram starlet
Every Hass avocado tree on earth — all ten million plus of them — are descendants of the Hass Mother Tree at 430 West Road, La Habra Heights, California. She died in 2002 of root rot at age 76, but her remarkable fruit legacy continues to grow in popularity around the world.
As avocado prices hit a record high price in the second quarter of 2021, avocado sales are trending to be an even more massive $20 billion industry by 2025. Of this, the Hass avocado variety will capture 95% of the sales. Because of this, it’s worth looking back on why — and how — the Hass became the one avocado type that the whole world wants.
Hass origin
The Hass avocado tree was created — through an agricultural process called grafting — by a rural mail carrier from Wisconsin, a man known as Rudolph “Rudy” Hass. In 1926, after moving to California, Hass purchased some avocado seeds from a local nursery owned by A. R. Rideout. Rideout was sourcing avocado seeds from several different locations, including restaurant scraps and neighbors’ yards. During this time, there were several different varieties of avocado being grown and sold in California, including the most popular Fuerte variety, the large, greener, and smoother cousin of the Hass.
But creating the Hass wasn’t easy. For two years in a row, one Fuerte tree rejected the graft. Hass was ready to give up and chop the tree down but he was persuaded to let it grow, just to see what would happen. The fruit that grew from the tree looked very different from the Fuerte avocados that surrounded it. The skin was black, not green, and rough and pebbly rather than smooth. Hass’s family tried the fruit and found it to be creamier, richer, and nuttier in flavor than other avocados. Encouraged by the fruit’s taste and the tree’s long harvest season, Hass decided to grow and promote the new variety that he named the Hass avocado fruit, after himself.
Initial demand for the Hass avocado seed and fruit was poor because consumers were put off by the dark green — almost black — color and strange wrinkly appearance of the skin. Over time, however, growers and distributors started to appreciate the Hass trees for their greater yield and the tough skins of the fruit, which protected the flesh, meant that fewer fruits were damaged during shipping. The black skin was also effective at hiding blemishes that would normally put off buyers of green avocados.
Some avocado background
Avocados have been eaten by humans for thousands of years. Native to Central America and Mexico, archeologists have found evidence that they were cultivated as far back as 7000 to 5000 BCE. The original name for the avocado was “ahuacatl,” a word which also refers to the testes, thought to have come about because avocados often grow in pairs that resemble the shape of human testicles. The word slowly evolved to the more Spanish sounding “ahuacate” after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and was eventually came to be called “avocado” by American farmers, through a linguistic process in which foreign loan words are made to sound more similar to the dominant language of a place.
As an increasing appetite for Hass avocados grew, one shop in Pasadena that catered to the maids and housekeepers of socialites, was selling them for $1 each — in the mid 1920s. But even though Hass avocados were filling the kitchens of the SoCal elite, the Hass family never made a lot of money from discovering the world’s most popular avocado. Being the first ever patent on a fruit tree ever, little could be done to enforce it, and growers simply grafted a Hass variety with other trees to profit from the fruit. It is thought that Rudolf Hass’s royalties from the Hass avocado were about $4,800 until his death in 1952.
Hass is richer, which attracts criminals
When it comes to nutritional content, Hass avocados are higher in fat than other varieties, which gives them their rich taste and smooth, creamy texture. 80% of avocados consumed in the world are Hass avocados. In the US, this number rises to 95%.
Unlike many other avocado varieties, Hass avocados are native to California, not Mexico, but today, Mexico is the largest grower in the world, with over 2.1 billion pounds shipped to the US in 2019.
In Mexico, the climate is particularly suitable to growing avocado trees and Hass trees flourish there. Some of the highest quality avocado trees in Mexico are cultivated by grafting the Hass avocado with other native varieties. In this way, the Mexican Hass avocados are able to grow on trees with strong roots, ideal for the local soil conditions.
Michoacán accounts for over 92% of Mexico’s avocado production and has over 30,000 groves of Hass avocados. Hass avocado importation from Mexico and other countries is expected to continue to increase to meet the growing demand, despite the increased production of Hass avocados in the USA. Currently, Hass avocados from Mexico account for more than 90% of all imported avocados in the country.
Unfortunately for Mexican avocado farmers and consumers in the U.S., the avocado industry in Mexico is currently being violently taken over by powerful drug cartels, utilizing violence in a turf war to seize the most productive avocado groves — all of the popular Hass variety. Recently, in Uruapan, in the state of Michoacán, the Jalisco New Generation cartel murdered 19 members of the rival cartel and hung them from a bridge in order to intimidate and terrorize the community. Avocado theft is also a rising problem worldwide, so much so that California has instituted an avocado theft hotline. This is surely something that Rudy Hass would have had a hard time imagining.
Today of course, Hass avocados sell for about $2 per unit and at restaurants, simple dishes like Hass avocado toast often sells for as much as $15. The avocado, once the most humble of Central American food staples, has become a hip luxury ingredient, featured in over 12.5 million posts on Instagram alone.