In 2024/25 Australia grew 13 per cent fewer avocados and earned 22 per cent more for them. Production fell to 131,385 tonnes while the gross value of the crop rose to A$794 million, according to Avocados Australia's Facts at a Glance report.

Less fruit, more money. If you only watched the wholesale floor that year, you saw prices lift and assumed demand had strengthened. The shelf told a more useful story.

What the wholesale price can't tell you

A wholesale price is a record of yesterday. It tells you how supply and demand met on the trading floor that morning. It doesn't tell you why, or what's coming.

Per-person consumption slipped in the same year, from 4.94 kilograms to 4.74, the same report shows. Shoppers didn't want avocados less. There were fewer to buy. The value was in fruit that was good enough, often enough, for people to keep paying for it.

That's a retail fact, and it only shows up at retail.

What to watch on the shelf

Three things are worth your attention. The first is the pattern of pricing: what the everyday price is doing, and how often and how deeply the fruit is being promoted. Frequent deep specials usually mean someone has volume to clear. Fewer and shallower ones usually mean supply is tighter than the floor price suggests.

The second is the promotional calendar. A national promotion pulls volume forward for a fortnight and leaves a hole behind it. Fruit that arrives into the hole meets a market that has just eaten its fill.

The third is condition. Avocados Australia's retail monitoring found 97 per cent of Australian fruit acceptable in March 2026, against an industry target of 90 per cent. That's a strong number, and it's an average. Walk the stores your fruit goes to and look at what a shopper would see.

Turning it into picking and packing decisions

For a grower, this is where it pays. If you know when demand will lift and when it'll fall away, you can time your harvest to meet the first and miss the second. Maturity comes first, always. Fruit isn't picked early to catch a promotion. But within the window when it's ready, a week either way can change the return.

Packing follows the same logic. Markets and channels differ on the sizes they want and the formats that sell. Grade and pack for where the fruit is going, not for an average of everywhere. And keep a general picture of what else is in the market that week, because your fruit is never on the shelf alone.

None of this needs a dashboard. It needs someone who looks, asks and remembers, and who tells you what they found.

How we use it

At The Avolution we work with more than 120 growers and report market conditions to them regularly, in plain terms. Information sharpens the judgement. It doesn't replace it. People decide when to pick, what to pack and where to send it, and they decide better when they can see past the floor price.

Wholesale prices tell you what happened. The shelf tells you what's about to. If you'd like to see how that reporting works, get in touch, or read about how we work with growers.

References

• Asiafruit (2025), Australian avocado sales rise despite production dip, https://www.fruitnet.com/asiafruit/australian-avocado-sales-rise-despite-production-dip/268758.article, accessed 10 November 2026
• Avocados Australia (2025), Facts at a Glance 2024/25, https://avocado.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/2024-25_AAL-Facts-at-a-glance.pdf, accessed 10 November 2026
• Avocados Australia (2026), March Quality Update, https://avocado.org.au/public-articles/march-quality-update-guac-10-apr-2026/, accessed 10 November 2026