We Gave The World Avocado Toast, Now Australia Has Too Many Avocados

Suzanne James has big dreams for one of her favourite fruits.

Avocado smoothies. Avocado cake. Avocado chocolate mousse. She tried the avocado pickle recipe—vinegar, chilli, sugar—but her family didn’t love it.

Australia, credited with spreading avocado on toast around the world, is creaking under a mountain of the green, pear-shaped fruit. Farmers in past years had planted thousands of avocado trees to keep up with demand, which, turns out, hasn’t grown nearly as fast as supply.

Prices in Australia are at rock bottom. Some of the fruit is left to rot. Yet the tough times for avocado farmers have yielded a bounty for avocado lovers.

“I don’t remember ever seeing them this cheap,” said Ms. James, a 51-year-old nurse. She used to buy two avocados a week. Now she doesn’t hesitate to buy three or four. Australia’s avocado deflation encourages more culinary experiments at a time when other groceries are getting more expensive.

Average single avocado prices at some Australian grocery stores are down about 30% compared with a few years ago. Grocery chains recently sold avocados for 1 Australian dollar each, equivalent to about 70 cents.

The country’s surplus is by one estimate enough to provide every resident with 22 avocados for the year. An advertising and social-media campaign is trying to persuade residents to eat more of them.

An industry-sponsored contest invited people to post pictures of avocado creations on Instagram and Facebook for a prize of $1,000. Avocado spaghetti, avocado parfait and an avocado face mask were among the winners.

Another competition aimed to find the best avocado toast at the nation’s cafes. And a branded Instagram account sends out new recipes every few days—creations such as grilled avocados and chocolate avocado cupcakes.

“I was a bit sceptical on avocado fries, but I was quickly turned around,” said Stuart Tobin, a creative director at TBWA Sydney, the ad agency that developed the avocado marketing campaign. “They actually got crunchy, but creamy in the middle.”

Mexico is the world’s leading producer and supplies most of the U.S. market. Americans started buying more avocados after seeing 1992 Super Bowl ads that featured guacamole, said Jeff Miller, author of “Avocado: A Global History” and an associate professor of hospitality management at Colorado State University.

“Everybody’s growing them,” Dr. Miller said. “Until fairly recently, they were just like money in the bank,” he added.

In Australia, Bill Granger, owner of a chain of restaurants and cafes, put avocado toast on his menu in the 1990s and got credit for making the dish popular. Avocado toast is now offered at virtually every Australian cafe. (Some amateur food historians wave around references to putting avocado on toast in Australian newspaper articles of the 1920s.)

In 2016, Australian columnist Bernard Salt in a satirical piece wrote that the reason young people couldn’t afford houses was because they were spending their cash on pricey avocado toast, sparking a national debate.

A TV ad during the Tokyo Olympics last year featured comedian Nazeem Hussain discussing how the avocado—which has a green and gold hue similar to the colours of Australia national team jerseys—is the “official, unofficial sponsor of pretty much everything Australian, ever.”

Australian avocado growers aren’t allowed to sell their fruit in the U.S. Even if they could, they would find Mexico a formidable competitor. The growers are trying to sell more to countries in Asia, including Japan.

In a local push, grower Tom Silver, who likes his avocados with a beer, said he has been trying to persuade his cafe and restaurant customers to sell avocado smoothies, which are popular in some Southeast Asian countries.

Mr. Silver said he hasn’t had much luck, maybe because his preferred recipe calls for ice cream. “It’s not particularly healthy,” he said. “The avocado is the most healthy thing in it.”

John Tyas, chief executive of the industry association Avocados Australia, said part of the strategy to sell more avocados is to get consumers to eat avocados not just for breakfast or in summer salads, but also in desserts.

He is investigating another avenue to ease the avocado glut: An attempt at the Guinness World Record for the largest serving of guacamole. The Guinness benchmark is a 3700kg tub of guac made in Mexico.

“We’ve got some ideas about how we might be able to do that, possibly leasing some facilities at a dairy because they’ve got big vats,” he said. “Then we’ve got to find enough people to eat it.”

How do you tell the time? Neal W. McDonough, the COO of a finance and policy startup in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., looks to Charlie Brown, the loveable, miserable “Peanuts” protagonist. An illustration of the character occupies the exec’s watch dial, Brown’s stout arms acting as the minute and hour hands.

McDonough, 55, bought the kooky Timex for a Valentine’s Day trip about five years ago, along with a matching model depicting Lucy van Pelt (Brown’s frenemy) for his then-girlfriend. To his surprise, he kept wearing the $150-ish ticker after the trip. “It’s now my business watch,” he said, adding that such a non luxury model can telegraph that he’s under no obligation to be flashy. “I have nothing to prove to anyone,” he said. “And the fun thing is, a lot of people notice [my watch].”

Though finance guys famously flaunt Rolexes or Patek Philippes on their wrists, an established subspecies of money men goes the other way entirely. In place of a sleek steel case and elegant ceramic dial? Mickey Mouse. SpongeBob SquarePants. Fanta-orange rubber straps.

Over the years, highfliers have made headlines for sporting Swatches. (See: Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman or former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein .) That “wealthy guy, cheap watch” ethos continues to resonate in boardrooms and on trading floors, with men of all seniority levels embracing plasticky, offbeat designs, from superhero models to calculator Casios. Many resemble something you might win in a claw machine. Priced from $30 to a few hundred bucks, they’re a bit of fun and a different sort of flex, conveying an “I don’t need a Rolex” bravado that comes from having made it. Call them anti-status watches.

Patrick Lyons, the managing partner of a family office in New York, rotates two contrasting watches: a 1988 Santos de Cartier and a Nickelodeon “SpongeBob SquarePants” model with a tangerine strap.

The Cartier, a family heirloom, is a slice of French sophistication; the Nickelodeon dial features a giant image of a pink starfish named Patrick Star who lives under a rock. Lyons, 35, likes that the second watch is idiosyncratic—and that its starfish shares his name. “I wear that more often than my Cartier,” he said, adding that he hopes to pass down both models to future offspring.

Leroy Dikito, 42, an executive director at JPMorgan Chase in New York, chose his $450 “Avengers” watch from Citizen because it reminds him of his father, who loved comic books. Though its stainless-steel strap reads urbane enough, its cheerfully garish dial slices together images of the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and other superheroes. Working in finance, you need to be “serious all the time,” so a fun watch brings welcome levity, said Dikito. “People need to know there is more than the big job and the title.”

Since a suit can only inject so much color, a watch offers that rare opportunity to “show off your personality,” said Eli Tenenbaum, 36, the director of corporate development for a New York private-equity firm. Plus, he noted, “If you wear a fancy watch, chances are someone else may be wearing the same one.” Tenenbaum runs little risk of twinning with a colleague when he straps on his Mickey Mouse or Snoopy Swatches, worn with premium Brioni or Zegna suits.

Evan Vladem, 37, considers his Casio calculator watch a neat “ice breaker” when schmoozing, a professional obligation for the partner at a financial advisory in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It came in handy to break up awkward moments,” he said of the black, $30-ish design, a Casio classic. At a dinner with an insurance partner a few years ago, he recalls, the conversation petered out after an exchange about a client’s situation, which involved some financial arithmetic. “I pulled out my wrist and said, with a smile, ‘Well, I’m happy I have my trusty calculator watch to help me here,’” said Vladem. “We both laughed. [It] kicked off another conversation.”

Even men who have invested heavily in high-end horology seem to be falling for cheap, kitschy designs. Scott Jay Kaplan, 44, a film producer and financier for Brooklyn company CoverStory, owns pricey models from Rolex and Audemars Piguet. But for daily wear he’s currently favouring a super-chunky $25 watch he bought in Argentina this past winter, a model similar to a G-Shock but by an unfamiliar brand. He says he has received a lot of compliments on it, and it has held up surprisingly well. “I bought it because it looked silly,” he said. “Not for clout.”

McDonough, the Charlie Brown fan, urges anyone considering a novelty ticker to follow just one rule: Don’t splurge. “I think the whole idea of luxury watch brands coming out with ‘kitsch’ watches is…a little bit absurd,” he said. “So anything over, say, $500 would be out.”

Prop styling by Marina Bevilacqua

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We Gave The World Avocado Toast, Now Australia Has Too Many Avocados

A glut has the nation rethinking ways to serve the green fruit.

The ultimate trading-floor flex? A Snoopy Swatch. Or a Casio calculator. Why lots of money men (still) favour novelty watches.