- Written by Madelaine Bullwinkel
ALL HAIL HONEYCRISP!
Gala is the most popular apple in the US
Honeycrisp has a growing number of challengers to its status as the world’s most popular apple. Cosmic Crisp, a youthful offspring, exemplifies the stakes involved in this contest. The University of Minnesota has spent $2.2 million dollars over two decades of research and testing and another twenty years to grow it to scale for the market. Other newbies include Sugar Bee, Sweet Tango and the French Kissabel whose red-tinted flesh is tart and succulent. Competition is fierce and the stakes are high when it comes to breeding the world’s most consumed fruit.
Given the science involved, it may come as a surprise to learn that Honeycrisp’s success is something of a fluke. A graduate student rescued it from a pile of discarded seedlings in 1988 at the University of Minnesota’s Agricultural Experiment Station. The Honeycrisp’s explosive juiciness could just as easily have been lost among thousands of its sibling seedlings.
The fact that flowering plants like humans have sexes means that each apple seed created by cross-pollination has a unique genetic identity. Apple breeders match apples that will produce a desired taste, texture, color, growing habit and storage life. Then they plant thousands of seeds from this match in search of one or two seedlings that will meet their expectations. Once chosen, the Honeycrisp seedling was grafted onto rootstock, making it a clone that was propagated at scale to sell commercially.
The Kissabel is French!
A full decade passed before the Honeycrisp became widely popular. Apple growers had found that its trees are fragile, slow to grow and susceptible to disease. Honeycrisps also ripen unevenly and do not hold well in storage. These factors and the size of the apples slowed their volume in the marketplace and made them expensive. It took almost 20 years of development and another 10 - 20 years in the marketplace for it to achieve its present status as bestselling ‘stud’ apple.
The Honeycrisp earned its breeders $16.5 million dollars in royalties before its patent ran out in 2008. It’s success broke the Red Delicious apple’s century-long hold on the market. Consumers had come to prefer an apple with tart flavor and juicy texture over the bland, mealy textured Red Delicious. Since 2010, the sequencing of the apple’s genome has given apple breeders information that continues to shorten the time it takes to develop a new apple for forty to thirty years.
Which apple do you prefer? Please feel free to write and tell me why. Send your comments to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I will report on your response in a future post.
