Billions in the Basket: The Hispanic Shopper is the Growth Engine of Fresh
Earlier this week, The Packer invited me to join its Billions in the Basket panel at the West Coast Produce Expo in Palm Springs, CA. I shared the stage with Jonna Parker, who leads fresh foods intelligence at Circana, Robert Olguin, who runs produce procurement and buying for Vallarta Supermarkets, and Brian Dey, who leads retail and merchandising innovation at Four Seasons Produce, with The Packer Editor, Jennifer Strailey, moderating.
The macro figure is easy to cite. Latino purchasing power reached 2.8 trillion dollars in 2024, up 78 percent over five years, according to NielsenIQ. On its own that number is abstract. It earns attention only when you can trace it to the cart, and in fresh you can.
Latino households now account for 15 percent of all food spending in the country, and food spending in this community grew 84 percent between 2012 and 2022, compared with 53 percent for all households over the same period. That figure comes from the Hispanic Marketing Council. Circana’s data shows Hispanic shoppers outpacing non-Hispanics in both dollars and units at a time when much of the rest of the market is flat.
How they shop matters as much as how much. The average Latino basket runs roughly $ 98, compared with $ 89 for non-Latino households, and nearly half shop multiple times a week. These are planned shoppers who build lists, respond to promotions, and concentrate their spending on the fresh perimeter. The most frequent, highest-intent buyer in the store is spending the most where produce sits.
The reason fresh holds that position starts with the structure of the household. Latino households are the largest in the country by average size, according to the Census, and roughly one in four Latinos lives in a multigenerational home, according to Pew Research Center. More people at the table means more meal occasions and more cooking from scratch. Fresh produce is foundational to how that family eats, not an indulgence. Robert described the same principle from the retail side at Vallarta, where produce sets the standard, the rest of the store is built to meet rather than functioning as one department among many.
The Hispanic shopper is discerning. They are driven by value, and price is one factor in that calculation, not the whole. They pick up the pineapple and smell the base of it before it goes in the cart. They know what ripe should look like and what it should cost. But value and cheap are not the same thing. I will gladly pay 17.99 a pound for soursop, because I am not buying fruit. I am buying the flavor and the memory of my childhood, when my grandmother had a soursop tree. There is nothing sentimental in that for me. It is a repeatable purchase decision, and a price tag will never capture the reason behind it.
Those considerations are inherited. The way a family judges quality, the willingness to pay for a flavor that carries meaning, and the standard set at the market years before, all of it passes from one generation to the next. A retailer who earns trust on those terms becomes part of a family’s habits rather than a stop on a list.
The industry has not closed the distance on this. Seventy-seven percent of Hispanic Americans say brands do not understand their culture, according to the Hispanic Marketing Council, and that holds true even as their spending rises. That gap is the clearest growth opportunity in fresh, and closing it is a commercial decision, not a goodwill gesture. Magid found a 47 percent net lift in willingness to engage when a brand accurately reflects Hispanic culture, and a 4 percent net decline when the depiction misses the mark. Nielsen measures culturally relevant advertising at three times the brand trust.
The fastest way to lose this shopper is to make them feel marketed to. They can smell it from the parking lot. If your strategy is a Cinco de Mayo post or a Spanish translation of the general market campaign, that is not a strategy.
The work starts with how the household actually cooks and gathers, and with who you hire, who you source from, and whose judgment shapes the plan before it reaches the floor. A transaction buys you a visit. Authenticity buys you a generation of shoppers.
The generational picture is where I see the most outdated assumptions. The common belief is that you reach older shoppers in Spanish and younger ones in English. The second and third generations are bicultural rather than post-cultural. They move between both languages in the same conversation and the same feed. Mintel’s 2025 research shows Hispanic Gen Z and Millennials now represent 23 percent of all Gen Z and Millennials in the country, and they place higher trust in culturally aligned content than the general market does.
Where they find trends, and even food has shifted with them. Latinos use TikTok daily at 48 percent against 36 percent of the general market, and one in five reports discovering new brands there, nearly double the general market rate, according to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
This is where storytelling around the perimeter earns its keep. Meet the Hispanic shopper where they already are, which increasingly means digital, and treat produce as a branded product rather than a commodity in a bin. The opportunity is not the largest available influencer but the creator the community already trusts, speaking in a voice the shopper recognizes. This is a discerning audience that will check a wellness claim and a unit price at the same time, so the message has to hold up on both fronts. What finally draws them is a shopping experience that reflects who they are.
The benefit of getting this right extends past one demographic. A produce department built to the standard the Hispanic shopper expects raises quality, variety, and execution for every customer in the store. Design for the most demanding shopper, and you build a better store for everyone in it. This is the foundation of what I call Culturenomics™. Culture is not a segment a retailer reaches at the margins. It is the operating system driving the spend, and in Fresh, it is driving the most disciplined shopper a retailer has.
Retailers wanting to future-proof their business must stop treating the Hispanic shopper as an audience to reach and start building as though that shopper is the center of the store, because the data already places them there.
My thanks to The Packer for the invitation, to Jennifer Strailey for moderating, and to Jonna Parker, Robert Olguin, and Brian Dey for a substantive exchange across the data, the retail floor, and the merchandising that brings it together.
