Do you remember the first time you tasted a Honeycrisp apple? Bedford sure does. It was the 1980s, and he had recently started a job at the agricultural school of the University of Minnesota to work on fruit crops. “I can’t remember all the things that swirled in my brain,” Bedford says, “but one was the question ‘What is this?’” The Honeycrisp he sampled as a test crop was so different from the Red Delicious apples he had grown up with, “and my knowledge was so limited that I was a little uncertain: ‘Is this okay? Is this all right?’” But it didn’t take him long to figure out that “not only is it all right but excellent.”
Honeycrisp has a “disruptive trait,” says Chris Gottschalk, a geneticist who works at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research station in Kearneysville, W.V. (his favorite apples: Honeycrisp and Golden Russet). Honeycrisp’s texture—the crispness—had never been combined with a high-acidity, high-sugar apple, he says. “That really struck North American consumers specifically well,” Gottschalk says. As its popularity grew, it went from being largely a “u-pick” fruit to becoming regionally available in groceries, and now it is the third most produced apple in the U.S.
Bedford says the world of commercial apples has two phases: before Honeycrisp and after Honeycrisp. Before, there were basically two categories to describe texture, he says: soft/mealy or hard/firm/dense. “With Honeycrisp, we had to redefine what texture was,” Bedford says. That texture was so distinctive and delightful that it has become the basis for many of our new apple varieties, which is why such a large number of them have the word “crisp” in their name. “Once you’ve had crisp,” he says, “it’s hard to go back.”
Honeycrisp inspired consumer demand for excellent tasting apples, and that changed the apple market. “It wasn’t that consumers wanted Red Delicious” back in the day, Bedford says. “They just didn’t have any choice.”