Super apple Cosmic Crisp?
America bites the hype
An apple that stays crisp for almost a year, tastes sweet and hardly ever turns brown: All this is to offer a new variety from the USA. Meanwhile, there might not be enough for baked apples under German Christmas trees.
Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash
In New York it is easier to find gilded chocolate or caviar on bagels than this apple. It's called "Cosmic Crisp" and has caused unprecedented hype in the USA. According to its inventors, the deep red cross between the varieties "Enterprise" and "Honeycrisp" really has everything you could wish for in an apple.
It should taste sweet, be crunchy, last up to ten months and hardly brown even when cut, that much the marketing machinery has already taught us. Now it has arrived on the US market - even though hardly any supermarkets carry the coveted and somewhat more expensive goods.
The first crop, which has been delivered to the United States since December, consists of a modest 450,000 boxes of 18.5 kilograms of apples each - but the number is expected to increase fortyfold by 2026.
While the first trees still had to be raffled off because of the great demand, the number of trees was quickly increased: To date, farmers in the Washington State State growing area have already planted more than 12 million trees - a clear sign of how secure the industry is about the variety.
The history of the "Cosmic Crisp" - the scientific name is "WA 38" - began 22 years ago. In 1997 breeder Bruce Barritt from Washington State University started to cross the deep red "Enterprise" and the slightly lighter and very popular "Honeycrisp", genetic engineering was not involved.
Several selection phases later the new apple was tested and turned out to be a splendid specimen: It was big, red and round, tasted good and had some advantages, which are also important for sellers and producers.
The "Cosmic Crisp" has a long harvest window and can be picked without much shrinkage even when there is a shortage of labour. In addition, the apple has a slower aging process and should remain crunchy even during longer storage and be robust against pressure, so that brown spots appear less frequently. These are great advantages, especially for a large country like the USA with long transport routes.
And when will the hype reach the Federal Republic? Germans are absolute apple lovers: according to the Federal Association of Producer Organisations for Fruit and Vegetables (BVEO), no fruit is eaten from any fruit. In 2018, every German citizen ate an average of 18.1 kilos.
This is many times the US consumption. The Elstar (17 percent market share), Braeburn (15.5 percent), Jonagold (13 percent) and Gala (7 percent) varieties were highly popular.
"Maybe the Cosmic Crisp" will be an interesting product for German farmers one day. But at present it is not," says the BVEO. This is mainly due to the fact that Washington State University holds the rights to the variety and that in Europe only one licensee in South Tyrol is allowed to grow and sell "Cosmic Crisp". But that's why apple lovers can still expect the new variety to be on the shelves in Germany in the coming years - but otherwise you can of course fly to America and hope that there are still some left. (dpa)
Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.
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