Utz and Campbell's Face Avocado Oil Lawsuits as 89% of Samples Fail a Purity Test

I think most recipe plans have a hole in them. They list the better inputs to buy. They never list which of those inputs a buyer can test on arrival. A team at UC Davis checked 54 samples of food sold as made with avocado oil. Forty-eight failed.

Two class actions have followed. On 13 August a New York federal court received Schultz v. Utz Brands. On 18 August a California federal court received Heiland v. The Campbell's Company. Both are claims and neither has been tested in court. Utz has not commented, and Campbell's declined to.

What the tests found

The study ran in Applied Food Research. The team pulled the oil back out of 74 shop-bought foods. Chips, mayonnaise and salad dressings were all in the set. They then read the fatty acids and sterols. Those work like a fingerprint for each oil.

Fifty-four of the samples came from 27 products that listed avocado oil as the only oil. Of those, 48 did not match the real thing. Chips failed at 93%. Mayonnaise failed at 71%. Every salad dressing failed. Of 20 products that listed olive oil alone, one failed.

That last line is the one to read twice. Olive oil has had 40 years of scandal, testing and rules. It now mostly passes. The newer oil has none of that, and it mostly fails.

The price gap is doing the work

Bulk refined avocado oil runs about $3 to $7 a kilo. The extra virgin grade runs $7 to $12. Palm and soy have sat nearer $1.10 to $1.30. So the swap can pay someone six times over.

The study does not say brand owners swapped anything. A maker can buy in good faith and still take a watered-down drum. The watering down can happen well up the chain, at a mill or a trader. But a gap that wide tells you where the pressure sits.

The bill lands on the brand

Here is the part that should worry a board. The lawsuits name the brand owner, and not the oil seller. Marketing wrote the claim on the front of the bag. Buying inherited the risk behind it.

Both brands matter to their owners. Boulder Canyon is one of the four names Utz calls its core. Utz lifted net sales 1.4% to $371.8m in the second quarter, with price up 3.6% and volume down 2.2%. The firm has also agreed a take-private deal at $14.25 a share.

Campbell's sits in the other spot. Snack sales fell 4% to $940m in its third quarter, from $982m a year before. Kettle Brand is one of the names meant to fix that. A court fight over what is in the fryer is the last thing either owner wants.

What a buyer should do now

The pull towards this oil is real and it is here to stay. Lay's now fries a kettle line in it. Fresh Del Monte bought most of Uganda's Avolio in March 2025 and is scaling it to 140 tonnes of fruit a day. It put the world market near $1.2bn, growing 8% to 10% a year.

So the fix is a test rather than a promise. Buy the claim you can prove. If a brand wants a shopper to pay more for what goes in the fryer, a picture of the fruit will not carry it. The winners here will be the groups that can hand a retailer a lab result for every drum.

For buyers of snack assets this is a new line in the check list. Ask which claims on the pack have a test behind them. In a deal, an untested claim on a growing brand is a live cost. Utz is being taken private with one of those claims in court.