I am looking to add a small white text box, with custom text in the body of my ggplot plot. The text I want to add is to identify a horizontal line I am adding to the plot.
You can simply change to
annotate("label", x = max(grossunits), y = meancbrate, label = "avg rate")
which will use geom_label rather than geom_text and so you get a rectangle around the label.
geom_label
geom_text