Nico Ramos knows how dramatically avocado prices can fluctuate. Ramos has owned Antigua Latin Inspired Kitchen in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, Wisconsin, for nearly 20 years, and he remembers case prices of avocados exceeding $100 in 2019; in December 2025 he was paying just $30 a case.
“The prices of avocados go up and down drastically,” he says. “And they can change each month.”
Despite those fluctuations, Ramos keeps the prices of his guacamole steady. He adds 3 percent to his menu prices across the board each year, in order to keep up with inflation, but otherwise guac prices don’t change, even if avocado prices skyrocket or plunge.
Our research shows that Ramos is not unusual in his pricing practices. Average guacamole prices across the country have been nearly flat over the past two years, despite breathtaking changes in avocado prices.
Dramatic Fluctuations
Droughts in Mexico in late 2024 pushed the average price for a 48-count case of avocados to over $80 in early 2025, according to Terrain, an agricultural research service. But in early 2026, the supply rebounded and the price dropped to a comfortable $30 to $40 per case.
To see how ingredient prices affect menu prices, el Restaurante examined the online menus of 94 Mexican restaurants across the country in 2024 and again 2026. Ten restaurants we examined in 2024 closed before we repeated the study in 2026, so we found other Mexican restaurants nearby to replace them.
What did we learn? That the average menu price of a guacamole appetizer climbed only 3 percent between 2024 and 2026, from $12.32 to $12.71. (When a restaurant offered multiple varieties of guacamole, we recorded the price of the “classic” variety.)
Even though the overall average price of guacamole barely budged, many individual restaurants did change their prices. Our data showed that 53 percent of the restaurants in the study — excluding those which we could not compare year-over-year — raised their guacamole prices between 2024 and 2026. The average increase was $2.32 for an appetizer serving.
On the other side of the equation, 28 percent of the restaurants we investigated dropped their guacamole prices during the time span of the study — some rather dramatically. Sunset Cantina in Boston and Tzuco in Chicago, for example, cut their price for a standard guacamole appetizer by $6. The average price drop was $2.88.
Promotions, Not Price Changes
Ramos from Antigua Latin Inspired Kitchen is not normally among the restaurant owners who drop the price of guacamole when avocado prices fall, but sometimes he runs promotions at those times to take advantage of the situation. For example, when avocado prices hit a low point last winter, he introduced a special flight of three varieties of guacamole.
“It was amazing,” he says of the promotion’s success, adding that the promotion did not include a price cut. “Why change the price when people are expecting those prices?”