Some top restaurants are reportedly ditching the fruit in response to its wide availability elsewhere, which is not such a bad problem to have for purveyors of the versatile crop. 

A freelance columnist for the Wall Street Journal has named and shamed the foods that may be falling out of favor in 2018, including avocado toast, kale and microgreens.

Alina Dizik cited an example of Detroit-based chef Zack Sklar who has taken his restaurants' best-selling avocado toast off brunch and dinner menus, replaced by seasonal toppings like squash and mushrooms instead.

"Avocado toast is so 2017," Duzik said. And she's probably right; at Fresh Fruit Portal we saw that any story about avocados got substantially more views last year than an article of equal news value about other crops.

It wasn't just consumers who wanted more of it, but the industry itself. 

The fresh produce sector is well accustomed to the vicissitudes of trends that come and go, and it may well be that avocados have become so mainstream that a certain niche of the foodservice industry will ditch them in favor of new ingredients and ideas for experimentation. 

That's actually wonderful to see, not just from the perspective of chefs mixing up their kitchens with new flavors, but in that it means avocados have gone from an exotic or hipster product to something normal; a fairly regular staple a consumer can expect to see available.

As an industry you don't want a product that suddenly sees demand skyrocket only to fall on the whim of changing tastes just at the time when you've aggressively planted more of it. You want steady demand, and a few creative minds in the kitchen trying out new recipes is unlikely to change the fact avocados are now set firmly in the public consciousness.

Of course, given its audience the WSJ article doesn't take into account the tremendous opportunity for avocado toast to gain stature in places like Europe and Asia where the fruit is nowhere near as common as in the United States. 

Click here if you'd like to read the original article, which makes a few other predictions for 2018 including carrots, kale and broccoli. And please let us know what you think of this - does this signal a new era for the green gold that has been the avocado? 

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