Avocados: not just for smashing and millennial breakfasts

Published on Aug 3, 2018

Just about any health aficionado will sing the praises of the avocado – all those vitamins, minerals and healthy mono-unsaturated fatty acids get them going just as much as all that green, gorgeous flesh.

But almost every one of those health nuts will scrape all the goodness out of the husky skin, and then chuck the stone in the bin. Little do they know that there’s a heap of goodness in there, too, if you only look a little harder at how you use them.

 

So what can you do with those pesky pits?

The more green-fingered Kiwis could easily try their hand at cultivating their own trees – although South Islanders are mostly out of luck as they won’t stand even a light frost and even North Islanders might need a sack-load of patience: seedlings grown from a germinated avocado stone can take 15 years to fruit.

Now, we at HealthPak aren’t renowned for our patience and we’re certainly not going to start growing trees so we can have a self-sown, smashed avo breakfast some time in the mid-2030s – so we’ve bought into a far more immediate and environmentally friendly use for avocado stones: they’re ground down to create a natural and mild “bead” that can go into our body scrubs.

While the world has, naturally and very rightly, moved well away from the plastic microbeads that are so harmful to our oceans and the creatures that live in them, we’ve always used more natural alternatives such as jojoba beans.

But because those beans were being grown specifically so they could be ground into the tiny fragments that go into HealthPak’s exfoliating products, our general manager sales & marketing, Jimi Kennedy-Grant, couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better alternative. He wanted something that was already being grown for a different purpose but which had a waste product that could be re-purposed.

“I was thinking originally that grape seeds might work, but they – like a lot of other smaller seeds – are just too abrasive. And then I discovered these ground down avocado stones and they were perfect,” Jimi says.

“Because avocado stones take a long time to break down when they’re composted, they’re an ideal product to take out of the waste product cycle. And they’re beautifully soft so you get a good exfoliation without any harshness or abrasion.

“Jojoba beans worked well and were botanical which is very important for us, but at the end of the day they were being harvested for this purpose and we thought it would be better to be able to use something that was already a by-product as that would be a better environmental message.”

Finding avocado stones as a new product to go into the body scrubs to replace jojoba also sparked a new formulation for HealthPak’s body scrubs.

“The new formulation has gone from being a cream to a gel which has a lighter feel, virtually no fragrance and is a fantastic look,” says Jimi. “A lovely, light and gentle product that still does a great job and is as natural as it possibly can be.”

 

For more information on HealthPak’s new guest amenities and some of our innovative and eco-friendly ingredients contact us on +64 9 579 6268, at info@healthpak.co.nz or contact us via the website.