It was a chilly Saturday morning in October, and at my local grocery store, shoppers were browsing the apple selection: piles of Gala, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Snapdragon, and Honeycrisp beckoned. I lingered over the organic Honeycrisps, pausing to look at the $3.99-per-pound price tag, before filling my produce bag with several conventional Galas, which sold for a more reasonable $1.69 per pound. Though I had my heart set on the Honeycrisps, I’d recently had one too many bland, mealy ones with none of the fruit’s signature snap and sweet, tangy flavor, and I was unsure if I was ready to take that risk again, especially given the price.
It would have been an easier decision if Honeycrisps were as good today as they used to be. I first tasted one 10 years ago, standing at my mother-in-law’s kitchen counter in St. Louis on a cool September day. I grasped the rosy fruit she handed me and took a bite. The apple’s paper-thin skin produced an audible crunch, and a burst of sweet, tart juice immediately filled my mouth. I chewed carefully. I couldn’t recall the last time I ate an apple for pleasure, on its own—not in my hand as a grab-and-go breakfast as I rushed out of the house, not sliced up and slathered with nut butter, and not peeled, cored, chopped, and baked into a pie. The Honeycrisp apple was revelatory for me: It was an apple that I truly enjoyed eating on its own.
And I did, for several years, until I noticed that the Honeycrisp apples I bought were, with increasing frequency, a miss. There were a few good ones here and there, but I often came across Honeycrisp apples that were dry and mealy. Beyond the hefty price tag, there was little to distinguish them from other standard apple varieties. Honeycrisps from my farmers market were typically better than those I purchased from the grocery store, but even those Hudson Valley–grown apples weren’t immune. As recently as September of this year, I had several Honeycrisp apples from a local farm that were terribly mushy and flavorless, making me wonder if they had mistakenly labeled another apple variety—nothing about those apples was like the fruit I had once loved.
I’m not the only one who has noticed the fluctuation in quality. My colleagues Daniel and Megan have both had their fair share of inferior Honeycrisps in the past couple of years. I also found multiple instances of people complaining about Honeycrisp quality on Reddit: Three years ago, a user wrote that the Honeycrisp apples they bought were “unrecognizable from the big sweet apples from the late 00s and 10s.” Another user, who posted earlier this year, mourned the loss of the “super sweet and crisp” apples they were able to find 10 years ago. The Honeycrisps of today, they wrote, are “bitter and barely sweet at all” and “On top of that they aren’t crisp either!”
What went wrong? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think, and it’s impossible to answer that question without looking at how the Honeycrisp apple came about—and how it shot to stardom so quickly.
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The Honeycrisp: Origins and Rise to Stardom
In 1983, David Bedford, one of the seed breeders behind the Honeycrisp apple and a research scientist at the University of Minnesota, had his first taste of the fruit. Crisp and juicy with a pleasant tanginess, the apple was unlike any he’d had before. “It caused me some question,” he tells me, recalling the sensory shock he experienced. “I remember biting it and thinking, well, what’s going on here?” He describes picking up textural and flavor notes similar to Asian pears and watermelons, and trying to decide if the fruit was underripe or overripe. “I don’t know if it was a moment or a day or a week that it took me to decide, I don’t know what it is, but it’s good.” The tree, labeled MN1711, bore fruit that was a cross between the Keepsake apple and another experimental variety identified only as MN1627; the tree had failed a winter hardiness test, and the university’s apple breeding program had designated it for the compost heap. Bedford, however, decided to give the tree another chance. It paid off, because it yielded what has since become Minnesota’s state fruit and one of the most popular apple varieties today.
Together with Dr. Jim Luby, the former director of the University of Minnesota’s fruit breeding program, Bedford worked on improving the hardiness, texture, and flavor of the apple—placing it in the university’s evaluation program and observing it under different conditions—until they thought it was good enough to release to the public in 1991. “We had convinced ourselves on the breeding team that this is good, but we had no idea really what the rest of the world was thinking,” Bedford says. “It became clear in time that the world—the consumers—really did like this texture.”
For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Bedford tells me, there seemed to be no interest beyond the Red Delicious, the one “nice big shiny red apple that you could have year-round.” The Red Delicious was the result of the industrialization of the food system: National grocery stores and distributors wanted durable, aesthetically pleasing fruit that could be transported and stored easily, taste be damned. The skin was thick and leathery like naugahyde, with sweet, insipid flesh.
When Grady Auvil, the founder of Washington-based fruit company Auvil Fruit, began importing Granny Smith apples from New Zealand to the United States in the 1970s, it was a refreshing break from the Red Delicious for American consumers. The Granny Smith paved the way for the Honeycrisp: Americans welcomed the green apple’s tart flavor and crunch, signaling to growers and retailers that consumers were ready for different kinds of apples. When Bedford and Luby introduced Honeycrisp seedlings to nurseries and farmers in 1991, “there was at least some open-mindedness,” says Bedford. “Consumers had been sort of awakened to this idea that there was more to apples than Red Delicious.”
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.
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Signs of Trouble
The tree, however, proved difficult to grow, especially in Washington State, the heart of commercial apple production in the United States. (According to the US Apple Association, Washington is projected to produce 179 million bushels—about 63% of all the apples grown in the United States—in the 2024/2025 calendar year, making it the country’s top apple growing state.) “Really a variety cannot be successful unless it’s grown commercially in Washington,” Bedford says. “We sent trees out, they tested it, and I had more than one grower call me and say, ‘That’s the worst tree I’ve ever tried to grow here. I’m pulling all the trees out.’” Not only is the fruit a poor fit for the state’s climate, which is much warmer than Minnesota, but it’s also prone to several physiological and storage disorders, like bitter pit and soft scald, which can affect both the presentation and eating quality of the fruit when it’s stored for an extended period of time.
In order to ensure the health of the tree, it’s essential to thin or selectively remove parts of it, a labor-intensive process. “Even if you’ve done all that hand-thinning and invested a lot in the crop, you can lose a lot of it to [bitter pit],” Josh Morgenthau, the owner of Fishkill Farms in Fishkill, New York, says. “It’s very fickle.” Unfortunately, even when farmers apply all of the best practices for ensuring the quality of their Honeycrisp crop, bitter pit can continue to show up in storage, and Morgenthau estimates that about 20% of fruit that looks clean when picked is no longer sellable because bitter pit shows up after a few months.
The fruit’s extraordinarily thin skin may be pleasant for biting through, but it also means the apple is prone to sunburn, in which the parts of the apple that get more sun exposure experience what scientists call “tissue collapse,” causing the fruit to turn brown or black. The delicate skin also makes it time-consuming to harvest: To prevent the apple’s sharp stems from puncturing neighboring apples in storage, the stems must be clipped extra-short. “Now, if you only had to do a couple hundred of those a day, no big deal,” Bedford muses. “But when you’re picking hundreds of thousands of these things, that slows down the picking process, which increases your costs.” (Dr. Kate Evans, the breeder at Washington State University who came up with the Cosmic Crisp apple, tells me that “something like 10 billion apples a year get picked by hand in the state of Washington.”)
Despite the challenges, growers in Washington—enticed by the profits the Honeycrisp could potentially bring and ignoring their initial bad experiences with it—eventually ended up planting acres and acres of Honeycrisp trees. As of 2017, the apple variety made up 13% of Washington’s apple acreage, making it the state’s fourth-largest cultivar after Red Delicious, Gala, and Fuji. “Farmers don’t miss out on an opportunity for something new and exciting,” Clark says. “Growing apples has tight margins and Honeycrisp and other premium apples give growers an opportunity to make some money and increase those margins.” Given the perceived quality and popularity of Honeycrisps, the variety could sell for far more than many other kinds of apples, making it possible for farmers to make a good deal more money on their crop.
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.
The move to Washington facilitated the arrival of the Honeycrisp everywhere and made it possible for consumers to purchase the apple variety wherever and whenever they wanted. All the problems with the Honeycrisp became much more common once the apple was grown and distributed on such a large scale; as Cornell University pomology professor Ian Merwin told Axios reporter Nick Halter, “There is no question that the quality that’s in the market is not what it was 10 years ago.” Apples are spending longer than ever in storage, and “even with advances in refrigeration in technology, that further erodes their quality.”
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Where the Honeycrisp Stands Today
Apple growers very possibly over-invested in the Honeycrisp crop without truly understanding that they likely couldn’t deliver a premium product year-round on such a large scale—especially with such a capricious variety grown outside its native zone. For many consumers, the Honeycrisp crop of today has not lived up to the apple’s reputation, and for the first time ever, there is an oversupply of Honeycrisp apples. With a surplus that is 71% higher than the five-year average, the national average for the cost of the apple is just $1.70 per pound. It is the cheapest the apple has ever been—and possibly the least satisfying and delicious it’s ever been.
As Bedford noted above, it is impossible for an apple variety to be “successful” unless it is grown in Washington. But what does success even mean? Turning the Honeycrisp into yet another commodity ultimately defeats the purpose of what Bedford and Luby were trying to achieve: a truly delicious apple with excellent eating quality. The Honeycrisp is a victim of its own success, and has become exactly what Bedford and Luby despised about the variety’s predecessors: a boring commodity apple.
