“Crunch: Building a Better Apple”, 2011-11-14 (; backlinks; similar):
Profile of the development & launch of the SweeTango apple, a successor to Honeycrisp (via a hybridization with Zestar), developed by the University of Minnesota apple breeding program, which has been running since 1878 and created 27 notable apples (earning its role as the state fruit).
Breeding programs like that are part of why Americans have historically shifted from consuming hard cider (made with inedible wild-types) to ‘eating apples’, but progress was set back by a drastic decrease in variety to the McIntosh/Golden Delicious/Red Delicious triumvirate—Red Delicious degrading rapidly in quality. The apple revolution began in the 1970s when Granny Smith proved US consumers would buy a better apple, and was followed by the Fuji, Braeburn, and Gala.
How does one breed a new apple? Apples do not breed true and every offspring is wildly different. Apple breeders use brute force and brutally stringent screening: an acre of thousands of saplings will be grown, and in all, the breeders will walk the row, grab 1 apple, chew it briefly, spit it out, and mark the tree if good. Any sapling which is marked several years in a row (a few score out of thousands) survives; clones of it will be transplanted elsewhere for further testing, and evaluated similarly for another decade. If and only a new apple tree & clones pass all these tests, will it even be considered for commercialization.
“I’d like to give a tree a couple chances, but I just don’t have the mouth time for that”, Bedford explained. “So it’s one strike and you’re out. With all these new trees coming on each year, you won’t have space unless you thin out the duds.” He sprayed another tree trunk with the mark of death. “But it is kind of nerve-racking, because you want to give the tree a chance to do its best. No one wants to be known as the guy who killed the next Honeycrisp.”
The winner of such a process must be both brilliant and lucky, and Honeycrisp was both. But UMinn breeders watched with dismay as they felt the released Honeycrisp saplings were mistreated or poorly-raised by careless commercial growers, and decided the next apple, SweeTango, would be a “club apple”: it would be fully patented & controlled, and sold only to select apple growers who would be required to follow stringent rules.
The “club apple” business model has proven to be its own revolution by internalizing the costs & benefits, incentivizing the creation of a dizzying variety of new apples reaching the American grocery market every year.