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60 free Avocado trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
52 free Avocado trivia questions with answers. Avocados are botanically a berry, evolutionarily a puzzle, and economically the fruit that turned a Californian mail carrier's stubborn seedling into a billion-dollar industry. This quiz covers all of it: where the avocado came from and how it got its name, why every Hass tree on Earth descends from one plant in La Habra Heights, which country grows a quarter of the world's crop, and what happens when a horse eats the leaves. There are questions on guacamole (its Nahuatl meaning, its first English description by a 17th-century privateer, the record-breaking batch made in Michoacán), on avocado toast and the millennial spending row it started, on ripening tricks, regional names from palta to zaboca, and on the environmental cost of the world's most-traded fruit. Difficulty runs from easy questions anyone who has made guacamole can answer to expert ones about cultivars, patents and botany. Every answer is checked against a source, mostly Wikipedia and grower organisations, so you can use the set for a pub quiz, a classroom or a Cinco de Mayo party without worrying about a wrong answer.
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Q 01Botanically speaking, the avocado fruit is classified as what?
A single-seeded berry
Unlike a peach or cherry, there is no hard stony layer around the seed, which is what rules out the drupe label.
Q 02The avocado tree belongs to the same plant family as which two kitchen staples?
Cinnamon and bay laurel
The laurel family, Lauraceae, is full of aromatic and often toxic species; the avocado is one of the few grown for its fruit.
Q 03Which country was the world's leading avocado producer in 2024?
Mexico
Its output doubled between 2013 and 2023, and Michoacán's so-called Green Gold Belt became the world's largest integrated avocado industry.
Q 04Which single cultivar accounts for around 80% of all avocados grown in the world?
Hass
Its bumpy skin turns purplish-black when ripe, and it rhymes with 'pass', though supermarkets often misspell it Haas.
Q 05What was Rudolph Hass's day job when he raised the original Hass avocado tree in the 1920s?
Mail carrier
He earned 25 cents an hour at the Pasadena post office and sold his first surplus fruit to co-workers there.
Q 06In which year did Rudolph Hass patent his avocado tree?
1935
He had planted the seed in 1926 and had tried at least twice to graft over the seedling before a grafter talked him out of chopping it down.
Q 07In which year was the Hass avocado 'mother tree' cut down after succumbing to root rot?
2002
It was 76 years old and had stood in front of a suburban house for decades; its wood was saved for a memorial.
Q 08In which Southern Californian community did the original Hass avocado tree grow?
La Habra Heights
Hass bought the 1.5-acre grove at 430 West Road with all his savings and a loan from his sister after seeing a magazine drawing of an avocado tree with dollar bills hanging from it.
Q 09The word 'avocado' comes via Spanish 'aguacate' from a word in which language?
Nahuatl
The Nahuatl word āhuacatl was also used as a euphemism for 'testicle', which is where the popular claim about the word's origin comes from.
Q 10By what reptilian name was the avocado commonly known in Florida before 1915?
Alligator pear
The name was a corruption of 'avogato pear', and Californians of the time tended to call it ahuacate instead.
Q 11The name 'guacamole' comes from a word that literally translates as what?
Avocado sauce
'Poor man's butter', mantequilla de pobre, is a different dish of avocado, tomato, oil and citrus that predates dairy cattle in the Americas.
Q 12Which country is the world's second-largest avocado grower, with orchards on well-watered volcanic soils?
Colombia
Its Hass output grew sixfold in ten years, and more than half its exports go to the Netherlands.
Q 13Which Mexican state produced about three-quarters of the country's avocados in 2024?
Michoacán
It exported 81% of its crop to the United States that year, worth $2.7 billion, and its growers face extortion from drug cartels.
Q 21Most of the fat in an avocado is which type?
Monounsaturated
About three-quarters of the fruit's calories come from fat, mostly oleic acid, the same fat that dominates olive oil.
Q 22The oldest known avocado remains, about 10,500 years old, were found at Huaca Prieta in which country?
Peru
Those early wetland dwellers ate avocados alongside chillies, molluscs, sharks and sea lions.
Q 23Avocado domestication is thought to have begun in the Tehuacán Valley of which Mexican state?
Puebla
Pits from Coxcatlán Cave there were long thought to be the oldest avocado evidence anywhere, at 9,000 to 10,000 years old.
Q 14Roughly what share of avocados eaten in the US in 2024 came from its southern neighbour?
About 90%
The US only lifted its ban on Mexican avocado imports in the 1990s, which is a big reason guacamole consumption exploded afterwards.
Q 15Which US state has made the avocado its official state fruit?
California
The state grows about 90% of America's crop, and San Diego County is its most productive area.
Q 16Which San Diego County town styles itself the 'Avocado Capital of the World'?
Fallbrook
The title is self-declared and disputed by Uruapan in Michoacán, which makes the same claim.
Q 17Placing an avocado in a bag with a banana speeds up ripening because bananas give off which gas?
Ethylene
Supermarkets use the same trick industrially, gassing hard fruit in ripening rooms so it is ready when it reaches the shelf.
Q 18What did hidden supermarket footage show shoppers doing that led Gil Henry to pioneer the 'ripening room'?
Squeezing hard avocados and putting them back
Shoppers were leaving without buying, so Henry, of Escondido, started selling pre-ripened fruit instead.
Q 19What toxin in avocado leaves and skins is dangerous to livestock, birds and pets?
Persin
The ripe flesh contains too little to bother most humans, but the ASPCA lists the fruit as toxic to horses.
Q 20What is traditionally added to cut avocado or guacamole to slow it turning brown?
Lime or lemon juice
The browning is an enzymatic reaction driven by polyphenol oxidase once the flesh meets air, so an airtight lid helps too.
Q 24In which year were avocado trees first brought to California, from Nicaragua?
1856
Florida and Hawaii had them earlier, from 1833, but it took until 1871 for a Santa Barbara judge to cultivate them properly in California.
Q 25How much did private chefs pay per Hass avocado at a Pasadena grocery in the 1930s?
$1
That was a very high price at the time; the fruit's big size and nutty taste won over private chefs before the general public.
Q 26What share of proceeds did nurseryman Harold Brokaw get in his 1935 Rudolph Hass deal?
75%
Brokaw specialised in the new cultivar and often sold out, while Hass himself made comparatively little from the tree that came to dominate the world market.
Q 27A 2019 genetic study found the Hass avocado is 61% Mexican and 39% which other avocado race?
Guatemalan
The seed came from a Whittier nurseryman who collected seeds from any source he could, even restaurant scraps, so nobody knows the parent variety.
Q 28Besides two Mesoamerican highland types, what is the third major domesticated avocado landrace?
West Indian
The lowland race grows from Guatemala down through Costa Rica and Colombia to Peru, and all three were described in the Florentine Codex.
Q 29Which cultivar, commercialised from budwood imported from Atlixco in 1911, was the dominant US avocado for the first half of the 20th century?
Fuerte
Its name means 'strong' in Spanish, and Rudolph Hass was trying to graft it onto his seedlings when his famous tree refused to take.
Q 30What does the avocado industry call small seedless fruits grown from unpollinated blossoms?
Cukes
Usually discarded for their size, they are occasionally sold as 'cocktail avocados' that can be eaten whole, skin and all.