KitchenAid’s current range lineup includes a finish called Avocado Cream, and the company isn’t hiding the reference. According to the National Association of Realtors’ own “Hot Home Trend: Colorful Appliances” report, the finish is described in the industry as “yes, that color from the 1970s.” It sits in a range lineup alongside Yellow Pepper, Misty Blue, and Scorched Orange — a palette that reads less like a modern colorway chart and more like a direct callback to the harvest-gold, burnt-orange kitchens of two generations ago. Stainless steel, for the first time in roughly two decades, has real competition.

Why “Avocado Cream” isn’t an accident

Appliance color names are marketing copy, and marketing copy doesn’t accidentally invoke a specific decade. NAR’s report frames the shift plainly: “manufacturers are daring to dream in different colors” after years of stainless-steel default. KitchenAid has also been naming an annual Color of the Year on its small appliances — mixers, blenders, kettles — with recent picks leaning into saturated, nostalgic tones rather than the muted neutrals that dominated kitchen design through the 2010s. The range colors and the small-appliance colors are doing the same work at different price points: signaling that a kitchen can look intentional and personal again, not just clean.

LG’s answer: skip the decade, offer all of them

LG has taken a different approach with its MoodUp refrigerator line, which NAR’s report notes offers “more than 190,000 color combinations.” Rather than commit to one retro palette, LG lets owners change the panel color through an app, and the fridge can sync its color panels to music, essentially turning the kitchen’s largest appliance into a programmable light fixture. It’s the opposite bet from KitchenAid’s specific, decade-coded finishes — instead of picking a nostalgic color and committing to it, LG is selling the ability to never commit at all. Both approaches are direct responses to the same underlying shift the NAR report identifies: buyers and renovators are no longer treating a monochrome kitchen as the safe, resale-friendly default.

Samsung has moved in a similar direction with interchangeable refrigerator door panels, shown at CES in colors including navy and light pink alongside wallpaper-style patterned options. Three major appliance makers pursuing color customization at roughly the same moment — one through direct nostalgia, one through near-infinite digital customization, one through swappable physical panels — is a stronger signal than any single company’s color announcement on its own.

Stainless steel’s two-decade run as the default

It’s worth remembering how thoroughly stainless steel took over in the first place. Through most of the 2000s and 2010s, stainless finishes were marketed — and generally accepted by buyers, builders, and real estate agents alike — as the neutral, resale-safe default, the kitchen equivalent of a beige rental wall. That consensus held for long enough that an entire generation of homebuyers has never shopped for a kitchen appliance in any other finish as a mainstream option. NAR’s own framing of colorful appliances as a “hot” trend, rather than a niche one, is itself notable specifically because it’s coming from a real estate trade organization — the same kind of institutional voice that helped cement stainless steel as the safe choice in the first place is now telling agents and sellers that color is a selling point rather than a liability.

What the 1970s callback is actually selling

Avocado green and harvest gold appliances were, for decades, shorthand for a kitchen that badly needed updating — a punchline in home renovation shows and real estate listings alike. That a manufacturer is now naming a finish “Avocado Cream” and marketing it as a feature rather than apologizing for it marks a real reversal in how that era’s design language is being read. It’s the same mechanism driving nostalgia-based decor trends elsewhere in the market: enough time has passed that the original context (a kitchen stuck in the past) has faded, and what’s left is just the color itself, available to be picked up again as a deliberate style choice rather than an artifact of when the appliance was purchased.

Whether Avocado Cream outsells stainless steel is a separate question from whether it exists as a real, purchasable option again — and per NAR’s own reporting, it does, sitting on the same spec sheet as more contemporary options. That alone marks a shift from a decade in which “colorful appliance” essentially meant retro-reproduction brands catering to a small collector niche. Now it’s a mainstream manufacturer’s regular product line, named after the decade it’s borrowing from.