Guide · Oils
UC Davis bought 54 packaged foods that say avocado oil on the front — chips, mayonnaise, salad dressing — and chemically tested every one of them twice. Forty-eight came back with cheaper oil blended in. Here is the whole list, named, exactly as the university published it.
The same study tested 20 olive oil products off the same shelves. Nineteen of them passed. Same stores, same aisle, same lab, same week — so it isn't the fruit, and it isn't that oil is hard to test.
Olive oil has had compositional purity standards, and people enforcing them, for decades. Avocado oil was only added to the international standard for named vegetable oils in November 2024 — under two years before these products were bought. And in the US, the FDA has never set a standard of identity for avocado oil. It has one for mayonnaise. It has one for chocolate, for juice, for whiskey. Not for this.
Meanwhile real avocado oil runs about $4–$5 a pound and seed oils run 50¢ to $1.50. So: three to ten times cheaper, a label with no legal definition, and a shopper who will pay more for the word on the front.
Nobody here broke a rule. There isn't one.
37 products, each tested in two separate lots — 74 samples in all. ✓ means that lot was compositionally consistent with the oil on the label. Search your brand.
Two products passed both times. Grove AvoYeah! Mayo Sauce and Grove AvoYeah! Garlic Aioli. That's it — out of 54.
Two more passed one of their two lots and failed the other: Lesser Evil Moonions and Simply Tostitos Sea Salt & Avocado Oil. Passing once and failing once is its own kind of answer.
Zero chips passed both lots. Zero dressings passed either lot.
Paying more didn't help. The products ranged from about 30¢ to $2.00 an ounce and price had no relationship to whether the oil was real. Expensive was not a signal. Neither was organic, and neither was the words "100% pure" on the front — several of the products that say exactly that are on the failed list.
And this one is hard to read past. In November 2024, Chosen Foods put out a press release applauding the Codex decision to create an international purity standard for avocado oil. Their CEO, Douglas MacFarlane, said the company had "made it our mission to advocate for consumers' right to transparency when buying avocado oil, which is why we guarantee the purity and quality of all our products." That release is still up. All four Chosen Foods products in this study — two dressings and two mayos — came back inconsistent with that standard, in both lots.
In fairness to them: an earlier UC Davis study found Chosen Foods' bottled avocado oil to be pure. That's a real distinction, and it's theirs to make. It just isn't what was tested here.
What the companies say. Primal Kitchen: "We maintain rigorous quality standards, including requiring certificates of analysis for every batch and ongoing testing from our suppliers to verify the purity and quality of our avocado oil. Primal Kitchen uses pure avocado oil in our products and does not blend with other seed oils." Kraft Heinz, which owns Primal Kitchen, declined to comment further. That statement and this table can both be true if the problem sits with a supplier — which is the researchers' own point. Worth noticing, though: a certificate of analysis comes from the supplier. It is the paperwork that arrives with the oil, not a test of the oil.
As of this page's last update, no company named here has published lot-level test results of its own. If one does, send it to me and it goes up here.
Every oil has a chemical fingerprint — a particular mix of fatty acids and plant sterols. Avocado oil's fingerprint doesn't look like canola's or soybean's. The researchers pulled the oil out of each product, read the fingerprint, and compared it to the international standard for authentic avocado oil, allowing a 10% margin so that natural variation — different growing regions, different varieties, different harvest times — wouldn't flag a real oil as fake. They also ran frying and emulsification experiments to rule out the possibility that cooking or processing was what changed the profile.
What would change this page: a brand publishing third-party lot testing, a re-test of these products showing different results, or the FDA setting an actual standard of identity for avocado oil. Any of those and this page gets updated. The avocado oil standard is also young and its exact limits are still being argued over by the chemists who wrote them — that's worth knowing before you treat any single line here as a verdict on a company.
Last updated 17 August 2026. Products were purchased in 2025–2026.