Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for eating avocados, according to estimates from the trade group Avocados from Mexico. Football fans consumed roughly 105 million pounds of them during the big game last year, largely in the form of guacamole, while about 217 million pounds of avocados were delivered to American grocery stores this January alone, a spokesman for the group told CNBC Make It.
If guacamole is on the menu for your Super Bowl party, do yourself a favor and make it from scratch.
Making guacamole is fairly easy and, when homemade, easy to customize, so you can have it exactly the way you like it. But the primary reason that you should make your own if you can is that it's much cheaper — about half the cost, in fact.
CNBC Make It crunched the numbers on the average prices for both the raw ingredients and for pre-made, refrigerated guacamole dips available at four national grocery retailers: Aldi, Target, Trader Joe's and Walmart.
The average cost of guacamole made from a basic recipe — consisting of avocado, lime, white onion, jalapeno and cilantro, plus a little salt and pepper to taste — is just 20 cents an ounce.
By contrast, the pre-made guacamole dips CNBC evaluated sell for an average of 40 cents per ounce.
Target's Archer Farms Classic Guacamole is the cheapest option available among the stores we surveyed: It's $3.49 for a 10-ounce container, according to the New York City-area prices we analyzed using grocery comparison app Basket. For a party of 12 people, you'd likely need at least three containers, bringing the total cost to about $10.50. That's roughly 35 cents an ounce.
If you're making a batch of guacamole for a dozen people, Aldi turns out to be the cheapest place to buy your ingredients, in part because avocados are currently on sale. The total cost would come to roughly $7.50, or about 63 cents per person.
To compare prices, CNBC Make It evaluated raw guacamole ingredients based on a recipe intended to serve 12. Prices cited are from New York City-area store ads, in-store price checks and listings on Basket.
This chart breaks down the prices we found for all of the items in our Super Bowl guacamole recipe at the four different stores we considered.
Don't miss:
- 6 foods you should never buy at Whole Foods
- 5 foods you should always buy at Aldi
- 8 foods you should always buy at Trader Joe's
- 9 foods and grocery items you should always buy at Costco
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