Is Your Avocado Oil Real? 3 Studies, the Lawsuits, the Label

How we checked

Primary records only. We read UC Davis's three study releases and the brand tables the university published with them (we compared both tables against the published files by eye), the abstracts of the three peer-reviewed papers, the FDA's own pages, the federal food regulations, the Texas Attorney General's release, Chosen Foods' public statement, and the federal court dockets for the lawsuits, all on October 24 and 25, 2026. The full journal articles sit behind a paywall we couldn't read through; where we quote numbers, they come from UC Davis's own pages and tables.

This page is about whether you got what the label promised. It isn't a health claim, and nothing here says a product is unsafe to eat.

Which avocado oil products passed?

These are the ones UC Davis marked clean, by study. Each is a result for the lots it bought then, not a guarantee for the jar on the shelf today.

If you want avocado-oil mayo and a tested result matters to you, Grove's two sauces are the only ones in the 2026 study that passed both lots. If you make your own, a bottle from the passing list is the place to start.

Is avocado oil fake? What three UC Davis studies found

Selina Wang's lab at UC Davis has tested avocado oil three times, and each time most samples fell short of what the label promised. The newer the study, the further from the bottle the problem goes.

The 2026 study is the one behind the lawsuits. UC Davis tested the oil inside chips, mayonnaise and salad dressings labeled as made with avocado oil, alongside olive-oil versions as a comparison. By category, it says 93% of chip samples, 71% of mayonnaise samples and 100% of dressing samples "contained other oils," while only one olive-oil product failed. Wang told UC Davis that frying, blending and emulsifying changed the oil's chemistry only "minimally," and the samples got "a 10% margin of deviation." The study had no outside funding.

Wang also doesn't put it all on the brands. In UC Davis's account, she said brands whose products failed "may not know they are using adulterated oil," that it "likely originates with oil suppliers," and that "food companies could do more to monitor and verify" the oil they buy.

Which chips, mayos and dressings failed in 2026

UC Davis published every product it tested. Each was bought twice; the column shows how many of the two lots UC Davis marked "compositionally consistent with authentic oil." These are lots bought in 2025-2026, and UC Davis itself says "a result from this study may not reflect a product's current composition."

UC Davis's own note on the limits: two lots per product is "not a large sampling of a brand's full production," and the results are "a snapshot of the marketplace rather than a continuous assessment of brand quality." Read the table that way: these two bags or jars, on those dates, didn't match.

Which store-brand avocado oils passed and failed

The 2023 study tested 36 bottles of store-brand avocado oil bought in 2021. UC Davis's published results name the brands:

Three details from that table matter for anyone buying a bottle:

• "Cold pressed" wasn't proof. "The oils from ShopRite, Sam's Club and Aldi all had 'cold-pressed' on the bottle... but they contained refined oil not virgin/extra virgin oil."
• Price wasn't proof either. UC Davis: "buying the lowest-cost oil increases risk of fraudulent products. However, high cost does not guarantee purity." Two of the most expensive bottles, Stop & Shop extra virgin, "were highly adulterated with refined oil."
• Origin was a pattern. "All the samples from Spain tested impure, along with samples that had more than two countries as their product origins." The same store brand could pass or fail depending on where that lot came from: Target's Good & Gather from South Africa tested pure, while its bottles from Mexico did not.

UC Davis's caveat applies here too: it "analyzed one to four samples from each brand; samples with different lot numbers of the same brands may have a different result."

Is Chosen Foods avocado oil real?

The record is split by product and by year. In 2020, UC Davis named Chosen Foods and Marianne's "the only brands that were pure and nonoxidized" among the bottled oils it tested. In 2026, it didn't test Chosen Foods' bottled oil; it tested two Chosen Foods mayos and two dressings, and none of their eight lots was marked consistent with authentic avocado oil.

Chosen Foods disputes the 2026 result. On its own site it says the study's suggestion "that two of our mayos and two of our dressings contain seed oils... is simply not true," that "we never add seed oils of any kind," and that "the testing procedures used in this recent study do not fully account for the unique characteristics of finished products such as condiments and dressings."

So: the bottle passed in 2020, the condiments didn't in 2026, and the company says the 2026 method doesn't fit condiments. None of that tells you what's in a bottle on the shelf today.

What about Costco, Kirkland and Marianne's?

Kirkland (Costco) isn't in any UC Davis table published so far, bottled or otherwise, so there's no published UC Davis result for it either way. Marianne's was one of the two brands UC Davis named pure in 2020. We've seen a brand press release saying the 2026 study used Marianne's as its benchmark; nothing UC Davis published says that, so we don't repeat it.

The avocado oil lawsuits, and where they stand

Since August 2026, shoppers have filed more than a dozen proposed class actions against the makers of products in the 2026 study, nearly all citing it. Every one is an allegation. As of October 25, 2026, no court has ruled on the merits of any of them. One case per maker, each confirmed on the federal docket:

It isn't the first wave. In 2024, after a Washington Post article on the 2023 study, shoppers filed proposed class actions over bottled avocado oil sold by Walmart, Target, Sprouts, Trader Joe's and others; in February 2025 a federal panel declined to combine the nine cases into one.

On August 20, 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into products "labeled as 'made with avocado oil,'" with civil investigative demands sent to "Primal Kitchen, Siete Foods, Chosen Foods with more to follow." A demand for documents is an investigation, not a finding.

Who checks "100% pure avocado oil"?

Before the product reaches the shelf, nobody. The FDA says plainly that it "does not approve individual labels before food products, including dietary supplements, can be marketed." The federal food regulations have no standard for avocado oil at all; a search of Title 21 for "avocado oil" returns nothing, while olive oil has a defined place. An international Codex standard added avocado oil in November 2024, but it's voluntary.

The FDA does name the exact problem. On its page about economically motivated adulteration, its example is a maker who adds "a cheaper vegetable oil to an expensive olive oil but sell[s] the product as 100% olive oil." We found no FDA testing program or enforcement action aimed at avocado oil.

So the checking has come from a university lab, then from plaintiffs' lawyers, then from one state attorney general. That's the whole point Label Snob is built on: no one reads the label for you until someone does.

Nobody checks first. Lying on the label is still illegal.

The government doesn't come and look at the ingredients unless something comes up. But it's illegal to lie on your label, and that part is clear. Federal law calls a food misbranded if "its labeling is false or misleading in any particular," and adulterated if "any substance has been substituted wholly or in part" for what should be in it. Selling either one across state lines is prohibited (21 U.S.C. 331, 342 and 343). When shoppers sue, they sue under state consumer-protection laws, and that's what the 2024 and 2026 cases are.

So before anyone tests it, what keeps a label honest is the brand. Brand recognition, brand reputation. What's crazy to me is that a company would risk that. The people paying more for avocado oil are the people who actually care about clean ingredients, and they're the ones who'd be getting the cheaper oil. If it's proven a company did that knowingly, that's a horrible thing to do to those people.

Whether any maker knew is what the lawsuits will decide. UC Davis's researcher thinks many may not have, because the switch likely happens at the supplier. The label still carries the brand's name, not the supplier's.

How to read an avocado oil label

A label can't prove what's in the bottle. It can tell you a few things worth knowing:

• "And/or" means maybe. Federal rules let a label list oils "not present in the product" when they "may sometimes be used," marked by "or," "and/or" or "contains one or more of the following." "Avocado oil and/or sunflower oil" is legal, and it means sunflower oil may be what's in your bag. More on spotting oil hedges in how to spot seed oils on a label.
• Order matters. Ingredients are listed by weight, so in a snack, "made with avocado oil" on the front and avocado oil third on the back tells you something.
• Refined or virgin. UC Davis: virgin avocado oil "should be green in color"; refined is light yellow, nearly clear. A pale oil sold as virgin is a reason to ask.
• "Cold pressed" isn't proof. UC Davis found refined oil in bottles labeled cold pressed.
• Origin. In the 2023 study, every sample from Spain and every sample listing more than two countries failed.
• Best-by isn't freshness. UC Davis: "The 'best before date' is not always a reliable indicator of quality." Store the bottle "away from light and heat."
• Smell it. Fresh virgin oil "tastes grassy, buttery and a little bit like mushrooms"; stale oil "starts to smell stale, sort of like play dough."

Refined vs. unrefined avocado oil

Refined avocado oil is processed to a neutral, pale oil; virgin or "extra virgin" oil is pressed from the fruit and keeps its green color and grassy flavor. There's no U.S. legal definition of "extra virgin" for avocado oil, which is part of why the 2023 study found bottles sold as extra virgin that held refined oil.

The quick rule

Read the oil line, not the front. "And/or" means the oil on the front may not be in the bag. A lab result is a snapshot of specific lots, not a verdict on a brand, and a lawsuit is a claim, not a finding. And when a claim matters to you, remember who checked it: so far, a university lab and lawyers, not the label.

Sources

All read October 24-25, 2026.

• UC Davis, 2026 study release (July 15, 2026): Avocado oil chip you're eating may not be made with pure avocado oil; paper: Lopez-Alvarez, Li, Vizgordiski and Wang, "Authenticity of avocado and olive oils used as ingredients in commercially processed foods," Applied Food Research 6:102389, doi:10.1016/j.afres.2026.102389
• UC Davis 2026 brand table: Studied products (media kit)
• UC Davis, 2020 study release (June 15, 2020): Study finds 82 percent of avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils; paper: Green and Wang, Food Control 116:107328, doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2020.107328
• UC Davis, 2023 study release (May 24, 2023): Nearly 70% of private label avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils; paper: Green and Wang, Food Control 152:109837, doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2023.109837; brand table: AvocadoOilResults
• FDA: Is It Really "FDA Approved"? and Economically Motivated Adulteration (Food Fraud)
• Federal law: 21 U.S.C. 331, 342, 343 (misbranded and adulterated food)
• Federal regulations: 21 CFR 101.4 (ingredient order; "and/or" oils)
• Codex: 47th Codex Alimentarius Commission, November 2024
• Texas Attorney General (Aug 20, 2026): Paxton investigates avocado oil products
• Chosen Foods: A message to our community
• 2024 lawsuits: Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, Order Denying Transfer, MDL No. 3133 (Feb 6, 2025)
• 2026 lawsuits: federal dockets via CourtListener (case numbers in the table above)

Our opinion, not medical or legal advice. Study results are for the specific lots tested; lawsuits are allegations.

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