How the Honeycrisp Became the Red Delicious

This has nothing to do with incel coups, but it is an interesting discussion of the decline in quality of the honeycrisp apple.

The Honeycrisp apple redefined what an apple could be. It was different from any other apple most American shoppers had encountered before, especially for consumers who frequented conventional grocery stores rather than farmers markets, where tastier heirloom varieties could be found even during the heyday of the Red Delicious. Unlike many other apple varieties, the Honeycrisp apple, journalists Deena Shanker and Lydia Mulvany noted in Bloomberg in 2008, “wasn’t bred to grow, store, or ship well,” Instead, “It was bred for taste: crisp, with balanced sweetness and acidity.” Earlier this year, Bedford told Scientific American that you could separate the world of commercial apples into two phases: before Honeycrisp and after Honeycrisp. Before the variety’s debut, common grocery store apples were either soft and mealy or firm and dense. The Honeycrisp introduced the concept of a crisp apple to the public and, Bedford says, set a new bar for both customers and breeders—so much so that Bedford estimates, unofficially, that 50% of the new apple varieties coming onto the market today are Honeycrisp offspring. 

This success is due to the fact that the Honeycrisp is—no exaggeration—built differently. It has a remarkably thin skin, and a crispness that is the result of the Honeycrisp having much larger cells than other apples. Apple cells contain vacuoles filled with juice; the cells are stacked on top of one another and held together by the lamella, or what Bedford describes as the “glue” that gives an apple its firm, crunchy texture. When you bite into an apple, your teeth cut through razor-thin skin and the layers of cells, fracturing the vacuoles of juice. It’s these oversized cells that give the Honeycrisp its unique flavor and texture, making for a truly delicious apple with a crisp texture that people have come to crave. 

Because the Honeycrisp was designed to thrive in Minnesota’s climate, Bedford and Luby made the apple available in the rest of the Midwest first, where growing conditions were fairly similar to those in the apple’s home state. Though nurseries began selling Honeycrisp cuttings in 1991, it took several years for the fruit to arrive at farmers markets and grocery stores in the Midwest. And when it did, it quickly became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. 

People could not get enough. And unlike common apple varieties like the Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, or Granny Smith, the Honeycrisp wasn’t available to purchase year-round. Instead, it was only sold from September, when the apple was at its peak, to February. This scarcity drove up demand even more.

“People would go to their local apple orchard or to their supermarket because they had heard about [the Honeycrisp apple] in Minnesota or they tasted something,” Dr. Matthew Clark, the head of the University of Minnesota’s fruit breeding program, tells me. “Word got out, people were wanting it,” as the eating experience was “unlike any other.” Soon, growers were planting the Honeycrisp in New York and Washington. 

This pretty much tracks with my experience; my wife is a far bigger apple person than I and she loves her some honeycrisps. But what happened? The answer in short is not surprising–higher quality led to overproduction and lower standards that could not keep up the quality on a very sensitive variety that was then foisted on a public of people who barely care anyway.

Then there’s the question of storage. Honeycrisp apples can spend up to seven months in common storage (which refers to a climate at 37ºF/2.7ºC) or 10-plus months in controlled atmosphere storage, a reduced oxygen environment near freezing conditions (typically 32ºF/0ºC) that slows down the respiration rate of apples and prevents further ripening. Dr. R. Karina Gallardo, an economics professor at Washington State University, tells me that the longer the storage time, the higher the probability of disorders—which means the more likely it is that consumers purchase a poor-tasting apple. 

An apple, however, doesn’t have to be stored very long to develop less-than-ideal flavors and textures. Though Honeycrisps are considered a good storage apple, a fruit that “stores well” could mean many things: It may look perfectly good, but doesn’t guarantee it will still taste good. “An apple can be pretty soft and mealy in six months,” Bedford says. “There’s no magic time for all apples.” There are numerous factors that can impact the quality of an apple in storage—especially when it’s a fickle variety like Honeycrisp, which requires careful tending to at every stage of its life. 

Many farmers who invested heavily in planting Honeycrisp trees likely did not take into account just how difficult it would be to grow, harvest, and store the apples. And maybe some just decided it was worth the risk. At its most expensive, at the peak of the Honeycrisp craze in 2012 and 2013, the apple fetched a hefty price nationwide, with Esquire reporting it at of $4.50 per pound in New York City.

To satiate the public’s hunger for the Honeycrisp, a once highly seasonal apple available only in Minnesota, growers have made the apple variety available year-round by planting enough fruit to store for long periods of time. Planting the Honeycrisp in Washington marked not only the shift of the apple from its place of origin—Minnesota—to a growing region it wasn’t well suited to, but was also a shift from a more small-scale, local apple industry to one that was geared towards Big Apple from the start. Growers in Washington never intended to sell their tidy little Honeycrisp crop at local markets during its short season—they wanted to supply the apples year-round, and in large enough quantities to stock supermarket shelves across the country in order to make some serious money.

I’m hardly going to blame farmers for investing in a product where there’s a lot of demand. But the quality is lower today and that is likely to continue. At least we can pay more for worse apples though and what’s more American than that?