Why an avocado can cost 25 cents or $3 — and what it says about grocery shopping in NYC

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The price of avocados could be about to change… again.

Produce wholesalers like Dan Spoerel are preparing for the annual shift from the California growing season, which ends in this fall, to getting avocados primarily from Mexico, where the avocados aren't just creamier, they’re also more expensive.

But even if prices spike, he knows New Yorkers will pay.

“You can't substitute anything for it,” said Spoerel, who operates out of the bustling Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx. “If there's no iceberg lettuce, what do you buy? Green leaf, romaine, spring mix. If there's no broccoli, you buy cauliflower. But an avocado is an avocado.”

Across the country, avocado consumption has tripled in the last two decades according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the city, it’s become a necessary luxury: We can add avocado to practically anything, our salads or burrito bowls — for a fee. While we could live without it, we just don’t want to.

But the superfood that’s packed with more potassium than a banana has a downside: its price across the city is notoriously volatile. In the same week, an avocado can sell at Union Market on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope for $2.69 while across town at the Asian Jmart in Flushing, a towering pile offers four for $1 — a quarter a pop. And every quarter counts in a moment when New Yorkers are feeling rising grocery costs. In 2023, an average household in the New York City metropolitan area spent $4,000 more on food a year than 10 years ago, the state comptroller’s office found.

Over the last few months, Gothamist reporters regularly visited four grocery stores in each borough to track prices on household staples and investigate what is driving price increases and differences across the city.

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