The Avolato Wants to Be the Next Big Instagram Food

Just days after activated charcoal croissants had led Londoners to believe they’d hit peak WTF in the “superfoods”-ruin-everything-good stakes, a concession stall in the Selfridges department store has given the world the “Avolato” (and a whole new collection of think pieces titled “Here’s another reason millennials will never own a house.”)

Snowflake (a gelato company), which is also responsible for the £99 “Billionaire’s Soft Serve,” has created a vegan ice cream that’s 60 percent avocado, served in an avocado skin, and finished with a “superfood” nut butter “stone.” It retails at £9.50.

In what could definitely pass as satire, Snowflake’s head gelato chef Silvia Gaetta told the Evening Standard that the Avolato is “not just a new flavour, it is a form of art.” Debatable, yes. And perhaps not so original. After all, it definitely resembles the Instagram-famous avocado parfait created by chef Alex Stupak at Empellon Midtown in New York City last summer.

And yet, there truly is an art to convincing people to part with an hour’s wage to eat a product so transparently cynical. A product targeted squarely at a generation who have, among other things, been told that the reason they can’t afford houses is that they eat too many avocados.

Asad Khan, CEO and founder of Snowflake Luxury Gelato is quoted in The Grocer as saying that the company came up with the idea after considering “how popular avocados are, and the health benefits they provide... The recipe also happens to be vegan, which is a great plus point.”

It doesn’t just “happen” to be vegan, by the way. It is — by design — vegan, dairy free, gluten free, and refined sugar free. Which is not to say that those things aren’t “plus points,” but that there is, behind the Avolato, a transparent drive to tick the buzziest boxes in creating something that Bruce Langlands, as Selfridges director of food and restaurants, has described as “at the forefront of the fashionable food trends.”

And yet, punters, exhibiting a complete lack of self awareness, will undoubtedly demonstrate that Khan was right when he said: “we expect it to be quite popular.”