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“Avocados don’t get boring at all,” Alvaro Luque, the president and CEO of Avocados from Mexico, told Business Insider.
Avocados from Mexico — a marketing nonprofit that promotes products from two organizations, the Mexican Hass Avocado Importer Association and the Association of Avocado Exporting Producers and Packers of Mexico — was started 10 years ago to tap into Americans’ love of the fruit, Luque explained.
A decade ago, millennials were having a moment — and their love of avocado toast probably helped boost popularity — so the company decided to focus on Gen X and boomers who “needed a little more convincing,” he said.
Now that older generations have developed an appreciation for avocados, it’s time to focus on Gen Z.
Luque’s insights are part of BI’s year-end leadership package, “Looking Ahead 2024,” which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you most excited about for 2024?
This year, we’re focusing on college football and health-related programs.
One thing we haven’t activated for 2023 is that we unveiled our new culture map. We worked with a company to develop our new company purpose, values, and operating guidelines. At the end of this fiscal year, we’re presenting the first plans of action to sustain the purpose.
Our new purpose is “nurture hearts to live life deliciously.” You have a play with heart, a play with flavor, but the end is to make people happy and healthy — that’s what we want.
What are you most worried about for 2024?
I think that the recuperation of the food-service channel has been slower than what we expected coming out of COVID. Inflation is still high. Labor is still an issue. In food service, there’s a very important opportunity for growth. It still is pretty expensive for several people, and that’s making that part of the business slower than what we want.
What’s one thing you got right in 2023?
This was a very special year for us. We broke a record with imports in the US — almost 2.5 billion pounds. We had a year where we had record impressions for our Super Bowl campaign, record promotions on the food-service side, record-selling bins in shopping markets, and a record Cinco de Mayo.
As a marketing organization, you need to keep on trying new things and keep the brand exciting. In 2022, we were very successful in unveiling our new color that we trademarked. It was a great splash for the brand. We wanted to keep on growing on this multisensory marketing idea. We started exploring the idea of creating a sound for the brand, and we actually did very good research and had plans to unveil it.
What we created didn’t work out as we wanted. We lost track a little bit of one of our powerful weapons — that is our jingle. So we backtracked a little bit. Our new campaign is based on our jingle, to try to really focus on the real sound that makes Avocados from Mexico great. That was a big learning for u
