We wanted to learn how prices vary by month across all the years to understand seasonal differences in prices of avocados. We also wanted to explore if these trends were different for organic and conventional avocados. We took monthly data, price and faceted the time series plot by the type of avocado. Figure 1 shows how organic avocados are consistently priced higher than conventional avocados. We also can see that prices in 2017 were much higher than prices in other years, indicating that prices are increasing over time. We can also see that there are certain months in which avocado prices are at an all time high, like the fall months between August and November.

To answer our research question of how differently regions across the US consume avocados, we subsetted the data by regions and then checked the distribution of avocado sales transactions across different regions by month. Here we can see that the West and the Northeast consume the most avocados and South Central consumes the least amount of avocados. There is a clear divide in the price and quantity sold between the types of avocados: conventional avocados are sold more, and are priced lower than organic.

Running a check on what regions comprise the highest volume of avocado sales transactions, we found that the western regions had the most spread, so we conducted further analysis on this area. We split it into Western states, California, and Western Texas & New Mexico regions to analyze the differences between these places. Here we could see that all of the western states consume more avocados than California, but only by a marginal amount. However, California consumes significantly more avocados than the Western Texas and New Mexico regions.

Now, we were interested in comparing the consumer habits of the Northern states versus the Southern states. We conducted a side by side boxplot analysis of five randomly selected southern and northern regions to compare. We could see that the southern states are mostly purchased more than the northern states, with the exception of Baltimore and Washington. Albany, NY purchases the least in the northern regions, and Syracuse purchases the least in the south, while Atlanta purchases the most.

Now, we made a dendrogram for the total bags and volume sold by price. We can see that the larger the bag, the higher the price, as denoted by the left hand cluster. Conventional (denoted by brown), small bag avocados had the lowest price, but conventional extra large bags bleed out into sections of organic (denoted by the green). All of these findings are very complementary to our previous findings, indicating that you can get a small bag of organic avocados for the same price as a large bag of conventional avocados.