When it comes to importing avocados to Italy, we simply have to talk about poke restaurants and their typical dish, the poke bowl. Poke bowls, a typical Hawaiian dish of fish, vegetables, rice and other ingredients, have conquered the whole world in just a few years.
The birth of these new chains has also led to a sudden increase in the consumption of avocados in Italy and, consequently, their importation: in fact, 70% of the fruit and vegetables purchased by poke restaurants are this exotic fruit.
This phenomenon has also had an impact on Conor's sales: from 2021 to date, avocado sales to the poke restaurant market have risen from 48,000 to 450,000 kg and are expected to exceed 500,000 kg by the end of 2023.
To date, this leading Italian catering and exotic fruit importer has a large poke restaurant customer base that has grown from a few dozen poke restaurants in the pre-Covid era to 280 today in northern and central Italy.
Where are avocados imported from? Conor and foreign distribution
Conor mainly imports avocados from Peru, Colombia and Mexico.
The fruit is harvested unripe and then stored for 30 days at a temperature of between 3 and 4 degrees. When they arrive at the warehouses, they are ripened at higher temperatures and only distributed to restaurants when the flesh is soft. The variety requested by poke restaurants is the Hass avocado.
As for the future prospects of importing avocados to Italy, Conor is working on the industrialisation of the ripening process, which is essential for exotic fruits and is already done in America and the Netherlands, but is almost non-existent in Italy