Avocados From Mexico Sees Cinco de Mayo As A Growth Opportunity Rooted In Cultural Alignment

Avocados From Mexico (AFM) helped turn guacamole into a Super Bowl ritual. Now, the company believes Cinco de Mayo could become an even bigger avocado opportunity. As younger consumers shift away from alcohol-heavy celebrations and toward food-centered social gatherings, AFM sees the holiday evolving into a major long-term consumption moment. To meet demand, the company is forecasting a record 230 million pounds of Mexican avocados imported into the U.S. for this year’s Cinco de Mayo season.

Alvaro Luque, President and CEO of Avocados From Mexico, is working to transform avocados from a commodity product into a recurring cultural event. During his tenure, Mexican avocado imports doubled to roughly 2.5 billion pounds annually, supported in part by eight Super Bowl campaigns that collectively generated more than 55 billion impressions. Rather than treating the Super Bowl as the finish line, Luque now sees Cinco de Mayo as the next major runway for growth. His broader lesson for marketers is rooted in what he calls a "pull strategy," where brands build around behaviors and traditions consumers already participate in instead of manufacturing relevance from scratch.

"Cinco de Mayo is a very important date for us. It's the second most important consumption date in the U.S., with a strong push to becoming first, I think, in the coming years," says Luque. His broader philosophy is rooted in cultural alignment rather than behavior change. Cinco de Mayo may be an American celebration of Mexican culture more than a major holiday inside Mexico itself, but Luque sees that duality as part of what makes the occasion so valuable for AFM. The company operates as an American brand with deep Mexican roots, giving it a natural connection to the celebration without needing to manufacture relevance.

Built around the bowl

Recognizing consumer habits before they peak is central to how Luque executes this strategy. He points to the sober-curious demographic movement among Gen Z and millennials as a major catalyst. As younger generations drink less, food is taking on a bigger role in how they connect. The brand is positioning guacamole as a natural vessel for that social connection. "In the past, it was Mexican beers and margaritas that were the only connectors with Mexican culture," he notes. "Now, food is going to take over, and that is opening up a pathway for us that we didn't have five years ago."

That behavioral change feeds directly into how Luque thinks about long-term volume growth. For the Super Bowl, AFM recently reported a record 300 million pounds of Mexican avocado imports tied to the event. The audience is enormous, with roughly 85% of U.S. adults participating in some form, but only about 20% of those consumers eat guacamole. Cinco de Mayo presents a different kind of opportunity. While participation is smaller overall, guacamole consumption among celebrators is dramatically higher, with roughly 60% of participants already putting guac on the table. "Adding 5% to 10% more celebrators is going to bring along 60% of them eating guac," Luque notes. "That turnover is way more aggressive in terms of volume than what we can see for the Super Bowl in the coming years."

Guac beyond tacos

To expand participation around the holiday, AFM is focused on broadening the role guacamole plays within the celebration itself. The company’s "reverse food truck" activation in New York City was designed with that in mind. Built around the city’s dense handheld-food culture, the activation invited consumers to add guacamole to whatever they were already eating, from pizza to shawarma to hot dogs. The result was both an experiential marketing stunt and a real-time demonstration of how guacamole can move fluidly across cuisines and occasions."Every time that guacamole shows up, you are in that Cinco mentality," Luque explains. "If you're eating a pizza and you show up to our food truck, we're going to put guac on it. If you are eating a hot dog, we're going to guac it."

AFM’s broader cultural strategy also shapes how it approaches partnerships and PR. The company teamed up with Diego Boneta, whose career in the U.S. and Mexican heritage closely reflect the brand’s own cross-border identity. The collaboration mixes modern food trends like hot honey and dill pickles with more traditional Mexican flavors through recipes developed for the activation. But the real value comes from how organically the partnership is structured. Rather than relying on a heavily scripted endorsement, the campaign leans into Boneta’s personal connection to the food, including recipes tied directly to his family background. When he suggested featuring one of his mother’s recipes at the event, AFM embraced the idea as a natural extension of the story it wanted to tell. "He is representing that crossover success story that we have," Luque notes. "This rounds out the heritage story that we're bringing to the table."

The business of belonging

Beneath the campaign activations and celebrity partnerships, Luque’s broader philosophy treats culture as a long-term growth lever, but only when a brand has a credible reason to participate. AFM invests heavily in consumer research to understand how audiences behave around major social occasions, then focuses on the moments where avocados already fit naturally into the experience. From Luque’s perspective, the goal is not to manufacture relevance from scratch, but to identify existing behaviors and build around them in a way that feels additive rather than forced.

That approach carries meaningful economic weight because of AFM’s scale. The company’s growth now supports an estimated $7.5 billion in total U.S. economic output and another $6 billion in Mexico, sustaining tens of thousands of jobs across both countries. As AFM continues investing in Cinco de Mayo through its pull-based strategy, Luque sees the work as part cultural participation, part economic bridge between two markets that are already deeply connected. "You need to understand both worlds," Luque concludes. "Not every cultural event is going to be good for your brand, and not every brand is going to work for every culture or event. Try to insert yourself in what they're doing and be a natural fit"