(Photo/Courtesy of ForAvo Agriculture)
China's growing health-conscious middle class is fueling a rapid boom in the demand for avocado, which is dubbed as a "butter fruit" in China. Domestic farmers have been rushing to produce seedlings and grow avocado since 2017, aiming to capitalize on the rapidly expanding market, which is currently dominated by imports from Latin America. Do the latecomers have the ability to compete with the early starters? Some industry insiders argued that it would only take three to five years for homegrown avocados to replace the foreign imports in the Chinese market.
Huang Qian, a Beijing-based white-collar worker, began her work day with a piece of toast smeared with freshly made guacamole as well as an avocado yogurt on Tuesday morning.
The 27-year-old young woman was on a diet, and having the "nutrient-boosting breakfast" or a snack with the lush green butter fruit that made her "full and satiated" while also enabling her to take in fewer calories and drop a few pounds of weight, according to Huang.
"Avocado really makes my day, and I'm now a big fan of the low-fat fruit," she told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Huang, who often travels overseas, had never tried avocado until May 2018, when she accidently saw it in an American TV drama that a typical Western family ate sandwiches with slices of avocado and cooked bacon as their breakfast, which aroused her appetite for the exotic fruit along with an interest in Western lifestyle.
Huang now spends 150 yuan ($21.89) to 200 yuan to buy about eight popular Hass avocados per week. And the health-conscious woman, with a salary of more than 15,000 yuan a month, is planning to spend hundreds more buying the high-price imported fruit in the future, after she expands her list of meals to include avocado, Huang said.
Young and trendy consumers like Huang, along with a rapidly-rising Chinese middle class who are keen to pursue a healthy lifestyle, are driving a boom in China's avocado market which has already surged to more than 30,000 tons - most of which are imported, and a record high revenue of more than $100 million in 2017.
The growth rate is also unprecedented.
A PR spokesperson from Walmart told the Global Times that the sales of avocado at Sam's Club climbed by 80 percent year-on-year in 2018.
At e-commerce platform Fruitday, the sales of avocado also posted a growth rate of 30 percent and 15 percent in 2017 and 2018, respectively, the company's spokesperson said.
But what's more inspiring to industry insiders including Zhang Songming, CEO of Hainan-based ForAvo Agriculture Co, an avocado nursery company that was founded in 2017, is the great market potential in China that has yet to be fully unleashed.
Avocado used to be a little-known fruit in China before 2017. Amid the domestic consumption upgrade, Chinese now consume 0.1 kilograms of avocado on average per person per year, industry data showed. That number is eclipsed by the 5 kilograms of avocado bought by US and European residents per person every year, and the Japanese' average consumption of 1-2 kilograms, according to data provided by Zhang.
Rush into the market
The ever-expanding avocado market seems to boost Chinese famers including Zhang's ambition to take a slice of pie out of the lucrative market.
So far, some farmers in South China's Hainan, Guangdong provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region as well as Southwest China's Yunnan Province - where the tropical climate is suitable for planting avocado - have either shifted to the fruit's seedling production or begun to grow the fruit since 2017.
Zhang told the Global Times that his company has completed the construction of two avocado seedling production factories in Hainan's Danzhou and Guangdong's Jiangmen, which could support an annual production of avocado seedlings of between 50,000-70,000, a world leading level in terms of output.
Another farming company, Yunnan Lüyin Agriculture Development Co - one of the largest avocado planters in China - has already been growing avocados in 7,500 mu (500 hectares) of farmlands in Yunnan's Menglian county. And the company plans to expand the land for cultivating avocados to 100,000 mu by 2025, its spokesperson told the Global Times on Tuesday.
