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 dish from Hawaiian cuisine made from fish, vegetables, rice and other ingredients, have won the whole world over in just a few years.
The birth of these new chains has also led to a sudden rise in the consumption of avocados in Italy and, consequently, in their imports: in fact, 70% of the fruit and vegetables purchased by poke restaurants are this exotic fruit.
This phenomenon has also affected Conor’s sales: from 2021 to date, avocado sales for the poke restaurant market grew from 48,000 to 450,000 kg and are forecast to exceed 500,000 kg distributed by the end of 2023.
To date, this leading company in Italian catering and the importing of exotic fruit boasts a large customer base served in poke restaurants, having started in the pre-Covid period serving a few dozen poke restaurants right up to 280 today in northern and central Italy.
Where do we import avocados from? Conor and foreign distribution
Conor mainly imports avocados from Peru, Colombia and Mexico.
The fruits are harvested unripe and then travel for 30 days stored at a temperature between 3 and 4 degrees. When they arrive at warehouses, they are left to ripen at higher temperatures and only distributed to restaurants when the flesh is soft. The variety requested by poke restaurants is the Hass avocado.
In terms of the future prospects for importing avocados to Italy, Conor is working on industrialising the ripening process, which is essential for exotic fruit and is already being done in America and the Netherlands, but is almost non-existent in Italy.