Giant ‘Avozilla’ avocados to go on sale at Tesco

The avocados are bigger than all previous years because of a bumper harvest in South Africa

Sophie Gallagher
Thursday 27 August 2020 22:11 BST
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(Tesco)

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A giant type of avocado, known as an “Avozilla”, which is up to 10 times bigger than a normal avocado, will go on sale at Tesco stores on Friday.

The Avozilla weights in at an average of 1.5 kilograms and is up to 50 per cent bigger than any previous avocados of this type.

This is due to a bumper harvest in the food’s native South Africa, which has seen the product grow larger than previous years.

The Avozilla previously went on sale at the British supermarket in 2013, when it was five times bigger than a regular avocado, but now it has doubled in size.

The Avozillas available this year have an average length of nine inches and circumference of four and a half to five inches.

Previous iterations had an average length of seven inches and a circumference of three and a half to four inches.

Tesco chilled salad and avocado buyer Jordan Blandford, said: “These amazing whoppers are guaranteed to stop anyone in their tracks.

The fruit is extremely rare and comes from just a relatively small number of trees grown by one of the world’s biggest suppliers of avocados, in South Africa.”

Blandford explained that Avozillas only grow every other year because the plant bears such large fruit it takes longer than 12 months to be ready to grow again.

“Last year we hardly had any but this year we also had very good growing conditions and these two factors combined to help produce the far larger fruit,” he explains.

“The Avozilla is perfect if you are making a party size portion of guacamole as you only need to remove the skin of one fruit. One of these monsters makes a huge bowl of guacamole.”

The Avozillas will cost £4 each and will go on sale exclusively at around 300 Tesco stores across the UK on 28 August.

In October 2019 a family in Hawaii won the Guinness World Record for the worlds heaviest avocado – weighing an impressive 2.54 kilograms.

It was grown by the Pokini family on the island of Maui in the family avocado tree which measures 20 feet tall.

It was first planted when Mark and Juliane Pokini’s son, Lo’ihi, was born 10 years ago.

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