The Avocado Oil Scandal Is Concerning.

I have spent a lot of time learning how to read a food label. I do it because ingredients matter to me, especially when I’m choosing what to feed my family. Most of the food in our house is made at home. I prioritize organic ingredients when I can, we eat paleo and gluten-free, we avoid seed oils, and our meals tend to revolve around good-quality proteins, healthy fats and foods that still resemble actual food. But I’m also a mom. Sometimes we eat chips (mostly from some of these brands) and I need something easy to throw into a bag before we leave the house, or I simply don’t have the time to make every single thing from scratch. That’s where the handful of packaged brands I trust come in. I also work with many brands that make amazing snacks, chips, dressings, bars and packaged food but I’m picky about ingredients ALWAYS!

And when I choose one of those products because the label specifically says it is made with avocado oil, that distinction matters. I’m not accidentally buying avocado oil. I am usually paying more (okay almost always im paying more) and intentionally choosing that product because of the oil it claims to contain (amongst other things — no refined sugars, artificial dyes etc).

That’s why the latest research out of UC Davis caught my attention.

What UC Davis Actually Found
Researchers at UC Davis recently tested commercially processed foods—including chips, mayonnaise and salad dressings—that listed avocado oil as their edible oil ingredient. The results were honestly pretty stunning. Ugh. Let’s dive in.

Of the 54 avocado-oil-labeled samples evaluated, 48 (which is 89%) had chemical profiles that were totally inconsistent with authentic avocado oil. UC Davis reported problems in 93% of the avocado-oil chips tested, 71% of the mayonnaises and 100% of the avocado-oil salad dressings. Totally YIKES! Researchers compared fatty-acid and sterol profiles, basically looking at the chemical fingerprint of the extracted oils, and even allowed about a 10 percent margin for the natural variation you can see among avocado varieties and growing regions. And yet — the overwhelming majority still failed.

That is significant. We aren’t talking about one strange bottle sitting forgotten in the back of a warehouse or a tiny difference that could easily be explained by crop variation. When such a large percentage of products don’t match the expected profile of authentic avocado oil, anyone who intentionally purchases avocado-oil products has a big reason to pay attention.

What Bothers Me Most About This
The BIG issue isn’t if seed oils are bad for you or not (they are bad for you don’t get me started) It’s about consumer choice and transparency. If somebody wants to buy chips made with canola oil, they should absolutely be able to buy them. (I don’t think canola oil should be allowed but again that’s another article lol) If somebody has no problem with soybean oil, there are plenty of products available to them too. But if I VERY INTENTIONALLY walk past those options and purchase the more expensive bag because it says it was cooked in avocado oil, I should be able to reasonably expect that avocado oil is what I am buying.

That should not be considered an unreasonable standard.

The FDA requires food manufacturers to list ingredients on packaged foods, subject to certain limited exemptions, and companies are responsible for ensuring that their products are properly labeled. The FDA does not personally inspect and pre-approve every label before a product makes it onto a grocery-store shelf, which means there is necessarily a level of trust between the consumer, the food company and the suppliers behind that company. This trust matters! Once we start treating an ingredient panel like it is more of a suggestion than an accurate representation of what is actually in a product, the problem becomes much larger than avocado oil.

Why I’m Not Ready to Cancel These Brands
This is where I think some nuance is desperately needed. I am not ready to look at these results and immediately declare that Chosen Foods lied, that Siete knowingly used another oil, that Primal Kitchen intentionally misled consumers or that every company associated with a failed sample is fraudulent. I’m also not going to film myself dramatically emptying my pantry into a garbage bag for Instagram — though I’m sure that content would do well right now.

At least not based on what we know right now.

One of the most important pieces of context from the UC Davis research is that the problem may be happening somewhere upstream in the supply chain. Food manufacturers often purchase oils through suppliers, brokers and other intermediaries. Is it entirely possible for a company to order what it believes is authentic avocado oil and receive something that has been diluted, substituted or adulterated before it ever reaches the manufacturing facility? YES! But if that is what happened, that still does not make this the consumer’s problem to solve. The company whose name is on the package is responsible for figuring out what happened in its supply chain and making sure the ingredient printed on that package is actually what ends up inside of it.

UC Davis food scientist Selina Wang has discussed this exact possibility, while also making the point that manufacturers have a responsibility to do more to verify what they are purchasing. I think both sides of that statement matter.

There is a huge difference between a company knowingly purchasing cheap soybean oil, putting “avocado oil” on the package and hoping nobody notices, and a company purchasing what it believes is avocado oil from a supplier and later discovering that the supplier did not deliver what was promised. There’s a HUGE difference when it comes to intent, but either way the company is still responsible for the product it sold us.

From the consumer’s perspective, neither outcome is acceptable because we still didn’t receive the product we thought we purchased and paid extra for. But ethically and practically, those two scenarios are very different. One is intentional deception. The other is a serious failure of supply-chain oversight and quality control. Both need to be corrected, but I don’t think we currently have enough information to confidently accuse these individual brands of the first. What I DO think we have enough information to say is that something went wrong, and “our supplier told us it was avocado oil” is not going to be enough of an answer for me.

This Isn’t the First Avocado Oil Problem
Part of the reason I’m taking these findings seriously is that this is not UC Davis’s first warning about avocado-oil authenticity. The 2020 bottled-oil study found widespread issues with purity and oxidation. A later UC Davis study of private-label avocado oils again found major problems, with only about 31 percent of the samples considered pure and roughly 70 percent either rancid or mixed with other oils. Now we are seeing similar concerns appear in processed foods that advertise avocado oil as an ingredient. At some point, repeated findings like these start to suggest an industry-wide vulnerability rather than a few isolated mistakes. Even the FDA has identified economically motivated adulteration of high-value oils, including avocado oil, as an area worthy of further research and attention. None of that proves that any particular food company knowingly did something wrong. What it does tell me is that the avocado-oil supply chain may be far less reliable than consumers have been led to believe. And if that is true, every company building a product line around avocado oil needs to treat verification as a priority rather than simply trusting the paperwork that comes with a shipment.

This Changes the Way I Think About “Clean” Packaged Food
One of the more uncomfortable lessons in all of this is that those of us who care about ingredients can do almost everything “right” as consumers and still not have all the information. We can turn over every package and read the ingredients and certifications. We can look for organic ingredients, avoid gluten, skip artificial dyes, choose products without refined sugars, look for grass-fed and pasture-raised ingredients, and specifically select avocado oil, olive oil or beef tallow over conventional oils.

I still believe reading labels matters. I’m going to continue doing it. Another reasons is because some of these brands (even before they might get acquired) change up the ingredients. We saw it with Oat Haus — a granola butter company — that since the beginning of time, aka when they launched, used organic olive oil and a few years ago they swapped to sunflower oil. They stood by their decision and even went into that “seed oils aren’t bad” dark (wrong) corner of the internet and they lost a lot of customers. They finally made the swap back thankfully and my point of this story is… if you find a product you love and continue to buy it because you know and trust the ingredients but never check from time to time to make sure the ingredients are the same ones you fell in love with then you’d entirely miss the swap from olive oil to sunflower oil or worse… something that involves a food allergy! If you have food allergies you need to keep up with reading ingredients even on trusted brands. A popular allergen friendly candy company that is known for being TOP 8 FREE also sells a product that contains wheat. There’s a lot more info to this story which again is for a different time but the TLDR: READ LABELS! EVEN ON TRUSTED PRODUCTS. OKAY? OKAY. Let’s move on.

A beautiful ingredient panel is ultimately only as trustworthy as the supply chain behind it. I can’t stand in the middle of the grocery store and chemically authenticate the oil inside a bag of chips. I cannot look at mayonnaise and know whether the avocado oil in it has the correct fatty-acid profile. Most consumers also cannot reliably determine authenticity based on taste, smell or price.

There is a point where personal responsibility has to meet corporate responsibility. And I think this is that point. I can research. I can read labels. I can ask questions. I can thoughtfully decide what comes into my home and what I feed my family. But I cannot run a chemistry lab in aisle seven of Whole Foods. Food companies have to make sure that the ingredients they advertise are actually the ingredients in the product.

And I would argue that brands specifically marketing themselves to health-conscious consumers should take that responsibility even more seriously, 1000%.

If part of your identity as a company is that you use better ingredients, then consumers are naturally going to hold you to a higher standard when questions about those ingredients arise. You asked us to notice the difference. You charged a premium based on that difference. You made avocado oil part of the reason we should choose YOUR product over the cheaper one sitting next to it. So yes, you own the responsibility of verifying it. Now we need to know how carefully that difference is being verified behind the scenes. This is why it also doesn’t necessarily bother me when bigger companies acquire these health-forward companies. These companies were built on very specific and intentional ingredients and if the ingredients were to change dramatically they would lose consumers. These big corporations want IN on the healthy food industry and they won’t stay there long if they change the ingredient lists.

What I Want to Hear From These Brands
I hope the companies involved don’t respond to this with the standard corporate statement telling consumers that “quality is our highest priority” and leaving it there. That really isn’t enough. The vibe is very, “Your call is important to us please stay on the line.” but then you sit and wait forever and never get the answer you’re looking for.

I want specifics about how the avocado oil is sourced, who is responsible for testing it and how often that testing happens. I want to know whether companies are independently confirming fatty-acid and sterol profiles or simply relying on certificates provided by suppliers. I want to know whether the products currently sitting on grocery-store shelves have been tested since these findings came out and whether any affected lots have been identified. Most importantly, I want to know what each brand discovered when it investigated the actual products UC Davis purchased and tested.

If a supplier sold a company adulterated oil, I want that company to say so and explain what it is doing differently now. If the company believes the study’s methodology led to an inaccurate conclusion, I want to see the evidence supporting that position. If independent testing of current products shows authentic avocado oil, I would genuinely be happy to see those results too. That kind of response would actually strengthen my trust in a brand because I don’t think trust comes from pretending nothing ever goes wrong. Trust comes from how you respond when something does. But at this point, saying nothing—or giving us a vague PR answer—is also going to tell me something.

So, Am I Canceling Siete, Chosen Foods, Primal Kitchen or Jackson’s?
No. Not based on what we know today. But am I buying more of those affected products right now? Also no. I even have a killer recipe that I’m sharing this week using the Primal Kitchen Caesar Dressing because it’s my favorite and I already filmed and edited it so it’s getting posted…. probably with a VERY obvious asterisk somewhere in the caption.

Will I go out and buy all these brands and their products… also no. Not right now. Not until I hear from their camp. I want information. I know the internet tends to move fast… a study comes out, someone screenshots a list of brands, logos get circled in red and suddenly everyone is expected to choose a side before most of the companies involved have even had an opportunity to investigate what happened.

I don’t think that is really helpful. BUT it’s not something to take lightly.

The UC Davis findings are concerning — keeping it real here. Actually, “concerning” almost feels too polite. When 48 out of 54 samples are inconsistent with the ingredient we thought we were paying for, that is a BIG problem. Huge. Massive. It’s not good.

I believe we are going to spend our hard earned money on these brands we deserve answers, and I believe every company affected should take these results extremely seriously. Like I’m hoping that their Monday mornings were spent in their HQ meeting rooms doing damage control to figure out the nitty gritty of the study, formulate honest responses to us the consumers and starting the process of testing their own products with the plan to show us their own findings. I hope they are taking this seriously and are working their tushies off right now to not just say the right thing to us but to DO THE RIGHT THING and get to the bottom of it and FIX IT! We should be getting what we are paying such a premium for!

If avocado oil is important enough to advertise prominently on the front of the package, then authenticating that oil should be important enough to make part of a serious quality-control program. BOOM!

I do believe in allowing companies the opportunity to respond to evidence before deciding what their intentions were. Let’s face it… there may be supplier problems here. There may be quality-control failures. There may be information we do not have yet. And depending on what these brands say—or don’t say—my opinion and my purchasing decisions could absolutely change. 100%.

I DO NOT HAVE BLIND LOYALTY to these brands.

For now, I’m not repurchasing the affected products until I get more information. I am paying very close attention.

Honestly — it sucks. Many of the DMs I got said “what the actual ‘bad word’” because these brands are ones that we have trusted for a long time. Many of us have been loving and buying and supporting these brands from the start and it becomes betrayal. Also there’s a part that turns to guilt. Guilt for not just making the dressing or mayo or homemade chips yourself and feeding your family the CRAP you so intentionally avoid.

I actually had an experience where I had people cleaning our house and then I found out that they had been using convention Dawn Dish Soap to clean the bathrooms that they had brought in and sort of hid from me because they didn’t like… more like they didn’t know how to use the cleaning products I had because it wasn’t familiar to them. And I felt betrayed. I also felt guilty for exposing my family (most importantly my son) to these chemicals that we work so hard to avoid because we know the horrible things they cause to our health. What this feels like is that reading ingredients doesn’t matter because they can trojan horse you into eating the very same ingredients you work so hard to avoid. It sucks.

I have supported many of these brands because they seemed to understand something that much of the conventional food industry forgot a long time ago: ingredients matter. Families are reading these labels. Moms are reading these labels. People are spending their hard-earned grocery money based on what these packages promise, and many of us are intentionally paying a premium because those ingredients align with the way we have chosen to feed our families. Some people are avoiding ingredients because of intolerances. Some are trying to eliminate certain oils. Others simply want food that reflects their values and the effort they are making at home.

Whatever the reason, consumers deserve to know what they are buying.

I don’t think one troubling study automatically means every brand involved should be thrown away forever. But I do expect companies to take concerns like this seriously, investigate them thoroughly and talk to the customers who trusted them enough to choose their products in the first place. I’m not making a permanent judgment about these brands until they respond, but I HAVE made a decision about what I’m buying in the meantime. These affected products will go to the back of my fridge and pantry for now until the brands come out and speak. So no, for me this isn’t a cancellation moment. It is an accountability moment.

I want to hear from Siete, Chosen Foods, Primal Kitchen, Jackson’s and every other company whose products were implicated in these findings. I want to know what happened, where the breakdown occurred and what they are doing to make sure the oil listed on the ingredient panel is actually the oil inside the food.

And then, once we have those answers, they can show us whether they deserve our trust — and our grocery money — back.