Guacamole
Burgers & Sandwiches 
Tacos & Burritos 
Avocado Toast 
Breakfast
Heart Healthy 
Sauces & Spreads 
Home > Education > About Avocados >
Avocado Harvest & Production
It’s our commitment to deliver to your kitchen nothing but quality avocados with a creamy texture and delicious flavor. Our growers and packers work tirelessly to preserve these attributes, and it’s that hard work that makes us a leader in the industry. Thanks to a rigorous quality control program devised and overseen by the USDA and Mexico’s Department of Agriculture, we’re proud our avocados are a staple in your supermarkets and households year-round.
Harvesting Avocados
Picking avocados isn’t as easy as shaking some branches. Instead, avocado pickers use a pole to pick the green fruit, as quality control mandates that once an avocado touches the ground, it can’t be exported.
Careful Selection
Once picked, not all avocados cut the mustard. When an avocado makes it to the packing house, samples are sliced to ensure only the perfect fruit make it to the next step. This is where the bumpy fruit gets a makeover; they’re washed and brushed until their natural wax shines through. The gleaming fruit then receive another quality check from a camera that detects skin imperfections and differences in size. But don’t think that just because an avocado has a delicious inside but less-than-perfect skin that it’s discarded. No, instead, these avos are designated to become world-class guacamole.
Quick Transport
Those avocados lucky enough to make it to the packing crates end up on your supermarket shelves a few days later.
Safety First An Unsurpassed Program
We are able to ensure that quality and fresh avocados are available to you year-round.
Our ability to deliver rigorously quality-controlled avocados to your kitchen is a byproduct of our commitment to food safety. In 2009, we invested in state-of-the-art technology that can trace an avocado’s place of origin in less than an hour. The Avocado Producer and Exporting Packers Association of Mexico (APEAM) is dedicated to adopting world-class industry standards that produce avocados with unsurpassed taste, quality, and food safety. The next time you take a bite out of an avocado from Mexico, you can be assured it has gone through a rigorous food safety examination.
Michoacán: The Garden of Eatin’
There are few places where avocados grow year-round, and one place is Mexico.
To be more precise, that place is the Mexican state of Michoacán, where rich volcanic soil, abundant sunshine, and timely rainfall provide an ideal setting for the growth of creamy, tasty avocados. In Michoacán, you can find more than 30,000 avocado orchards that bloom 365 days a year.
Bloomin’ Avos
Each bloom cycle has a name and corresponds to the time of year when farmers harvest avocados:
Loca
full bloom
Avocados are ready for picking in orchards located below an elevation of 2,000 meters in June and everywhere in the state from July through September.
Aventajada
advantaged
Avocados are ready for picking in orchards located below 1,600 meters from July to August, in orchards from 1,600 to 2,100 meters in August and September, and in orchards above 2,100 meters in October.
Normal
normal
It’s during this bloom when the majority of avocados are produced. The crop is available in lower area orchards (1,100 to 1,600 meters) in September, in orchards below 2,100 meters in October, and in most all of the orchards in the state from November through February.
Marzena
Bloom from March
Avocados are ready for picking in orchards below 1,900 meters in March, from orchards 1,600 to 2,000 meters in April, from 2,000 to 2,300 meters in May, and from orchards at 2,300 to 2,500 meters in June.
Lavacados
In the heart of the feared Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, among more than 100 volcanoes, a sea of avocado trees thrive. This volcanic soil makes Michoacán a particularly fertile region for avocados.
The love, care, and dedication to the land, and the bounty of avocados are what give this beautiful region the well-deserved name: Avocadoland.
How to Tell if an Avocado is Ripe
How to ripen an avocado
How to Slice and Dice an Avocado
How to Eat Avocados
