Bottles of avocado oil on New Zealand supermarket shelves are at the centre of a fraud allegation, after an industry group paid for laboratory testing that it says shows some products sold as pure avocado oil have been cut with other, cheaper oils. The claims were reported by 1News on Friday and have been rejected by the main brand named in them.
The testing was commissioned by the Avocado Trust, an alliance of avocado oil producers on both sides of the Tasman, and carried out by Eurofins Central Analytical Laboratories in New Orleans. According to 1News, the results indicated that products sold under the Cocolife, HBC Trading Chef’s Choice and Cherry Creek Estate labels had been diluted with undeclared ingredients. None of those findings have been tested by a court or confirmed by a food regulator on either side of the Tasman.
Cocolife, which is based in Australia and whose oil is sold in New Zealand, told 1News it “rejects the allegations that its avocado oil products are not 100% avocado oil”, and said its processes are independently audited by the certification firm SGS and include fraud vulnerability assessments. HBC Trading had no comment. Cherry Creek Estate did not respond to requests for comment. The New South Wales Food Authority told 1News it had received a complaint about avocado oil products and was investigating.
The Avocado Trust chairman, James Greenlees, said the group started looking at the market because the maths did not add up. “We began noticing prices for some products of avocado oil that were cheaper than what we could see in terms of traded crude avocado oil prices so we started to become a bit, I think, suspicious,” he told 1News.
It is worth being clear about who is making the claim. The Avocado Trust is not a regulator and it is not neutral. It is an industry body whose members sell avocado oil in the same aisle as the brands it has accused, and cheap competitors hurt its members directly. The trust also publishes a list of products it says passed the same style of testing, and the New Zealand names on it read like a roll call of the local industry, including Grove, AvoPure, Turners Harvest, J & P Turner, Southern Forest and Orchard Bay. Grove has been pressing oil in the Bay of Plenty for more than 20 years and exports to more than 20 countries. That does not make the test results wrong, but it does mean the results deserve independent confirmation rather than a straight run into the news.
What gives the allegation weight is that it fits a pattern already documented offshore. In July researchers at the University of California, Davis published a study in the journal Applied Food Research that tested 54 processed foods listing avocado oil as their only oil ingredient. Forty eight of them failed authenticity testing. Ninety three percent of the chips, 71 percent of the mayonnaises and every salad dressing tested came back inconsistent with genuine avocado oil, with cheaper canola, safflower or soybean oil showing up instead. The products were bought in California stores and online in 2025 and 2026, so the study says nothing directly about New Zealand shelves, but the supply chains overlap.
Professor Selina Wang, who led that work, was shown the trans-Tasman results and told 1News “the profile I’m seeing is inconsistent with authentic avocado oil”. Her team’s method relies on measuring fatty acids and sterols, the chemical fingerprints that differ between oils. That is the awkward part for shoppers. You cannot see, smell or taste the difference between a bottle of pure avocado oil and one that has been quietly stretched with canola. You need a laboratory, and the price premium on avocado oil can run to several hundred percent, which is exactly the sort of gap that makes substitution profitable.
Greenlees wants that gap policed by someone other than the industry itself. “We need a specialist body that tests high-risk products and investigates fraud before consumers or journalists have to uncover it,” he said. The model he points to is Britain’s National Food Crime Unit, a law enforcement arm of the Food Standards Agency set up in 2015 after the 2013 horse meat scandal, which investigates adulteration, substitution and document fraud in food supply chains and runs a confidential reporting line.
The Government is not persuaded there is a hole to fill. The Minister for Food Safety, Andrew Hoggard, said he had not received any proposals to set up a dedicated food fraud unit, and that the approach already taken by the Ministry for Primary Industries includes fraud management and enforcement.
He has a point worth putting on the record, because New Zealand has run a large food fraud prosecution recently and won it. In May last year the Manukau District Court fined a group of companies, directors and managers a total of $1,629,500 after a New Zealand Food Safety investigation found they had deliberately mixed exported tallow with other fats and oils. Adding the cheaper oils lowered free fatty acid levels and let the tallow be sold at a higher grade. More than 8,000 tonnes of non-compliant product went offshore before the case was brought, and the investigation only started because a whistleblower picked up the phone.
That case is both the argument for the current system and the argument against it. It shows New Zealand Food Safety can and does prosecute deliberate adulteration under the Animal Products Act. It also shows how the fraud tends to surface, which is when an insider talks or an industry group starts checking prices, rather than through routine testing of the products people actually buy. Avocado oil sits in the awkward middle of that picture, because it is a premium domestic food product rather than a bulk export line, and mislabelling it is a consumer and fair trading problem more than a safety one. Nobody is suggesting the oils involved are dangerous to eat.
For now the practical options for shoppers are limited. New Zealand Food Safety takes food complaints from the public, including complaints about labelling, and the Commerce Commission handles misleading claims about what a product contains under the Fair Trading Act. Beyond that, the country of origin on the label is about the only signal available at the shelf, and it does not tell you what is in the bottle.
Do you buy avocado oil, and would you pay more for a bottle that came with an independent purity test behind it? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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