Yuen: How Minnesota’s No. 1 apple changed the industry — and the taste of apples to come

Every time you bite into a Honeycrisp apple, setting off an explosion of crunch and sweetness in your mouth, you can thank the ever-patient fruit breeders at the University of Minnesota.

It’s easy to forget that apple-eating was once a mundane affair. Decades ago, you may have packed an obligatory Red Delicious into your brown paper lunch sack, but it often came home with you untouched. Mealy and flavorless, the thick-skinned apples I consumed (or didn’t) as a child were more of a dreaded chore than a treat to savor.

U professor Jim Luby and a colleague, David Bedford, nurtured the Honeycrisp into the worldwide phenomenon it is today. They were young horticulture scientists when they joined the U’s fruit breeding and genetics program in 1982. Under Luby’s leadership, the U has developed 31 varieties of apples (including family favorites Zestar!, SweeTango and First Kiss), berries, grapes and other fruits. Honeycrisp, now a juggernaut, started as “a local little apple that Minnesotans knew about,” Luby recalled fondly.

As he retires after 42 years, I spoke to Luby about how the Honeycrisp transformed the apple production industry as well as the eating experience. Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation.

Q. Did you grow up eating Red Delicious apples and think, “There’s got to be a better way”?

A. I’m sure I did. If you grew up as a kid in the ‘60s, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and Macintosh were pretty much what we had available.

Q: What did you think of those varieties?

A: Well, I don’t think they turned me on to eating a lot of apples.

Q: You’re so diplomatic! Tell me about the journey to develop the Honeycrisp and make it a commercial success.

A: The original cross was made in 1960, so it was long before David [Bedford, who is still at the U] and I started; we were probably in elementary school then. We found the cross in 1982 when we started working on the apples.

New apple varieties nowadays often get a big marketing push, but Honeycrisp didn’t have any of that when it came out in 1991. Its popularity grew organically. Growers right here in Minnesota were the first ones to hear about it and started planting a few trees and selling them at farmers’ markets. People latched onto it. They eventually started asking some of the local retailers to carry it. Lunds and Byerlys were very instrumental in the early stages in terms of carrying Honeycrisp and getting it popularized. Then other apple growers around the country began to notice that this thing was really catching on. The Twin Cities market is one of the better produce markets in the United States: We eat far more volume per capita than folks in a lot of other major cities, and also at a higher price.

Eventually the Honeycrisp was planted in Michigan, New York and Washington. This year it’s projected to be the No. 1 apple in the United States in terms of value of the crop (pounds of fruit multiplied by the price).

Q: I heard that the Honeycrisp was almost axed from the U’s program. What happened?

A: It was actually thrown out before David and I got there. It should have been cut out of the U’s orchard because it showed some damage during some of the bad winters we had in the 1970s. But somehow the orchard crew didn’t get the word, and a few trees survived. I mean, David and I have probably wiped out some things that were pretty good, too. But you can’t dwell on that. You’ve got to look for the good ones and hope you can keep them, knowing that you’ve probably made some mistakes.

Q: When you took on this job to lead the program back in 1982, did you realize that you and your team would leave such a lasting legacy in the apple business?

A: No. In fact, when I was a young guy in my 20s, we went around and asked producers of lots of different fruits, “What do you want? What do you need in terms of new varieties of fruits?” And several apple growers at that time said, “We don’t need any new varieties. We’re quite happy with what we have.”

Q: How many duds do you have to taste before coming up with a winning apple variety?

A: We make the crosses. Then we get seeds that are grown up to the point where they fruit, and then we’ve got to taste the fruit from each seedling. We figure it’s only about one in 10,000 seedlings that is good enough to introduce as a new variety. So that means you’ve got to taste 9,999 of them.

As David would say, “We don’t want pretty good apples. We want really excellent apples.” Honeycrisp has raised the bar.

Q: When you’re taste-testing your 9,000th bite, do you ever think, “I just can’t eat another apple”?

A: Oh, yeah. You feel that all the time. We taste them, we chew them, we get the feel for them in our mouths, and then we spit them out. We don’t eat 500 apples a day, but we might taste 500 apples a day.

It does take some concentration. I liken it to other jobs that could seem repetitive. How can an accountant look at spreadsheets all day on their computer monitor? That seems really awful. How does your editor look at those articles every day? Well, they’re good at their jobs. They know how to focus. They know what they’re looking for. And they power their way through it.

Q. What other lessons have you gleaned in your 42 years of working in this field?

A. Patience is certainly one thing, because the world of fruit breeding is very slow. Trees take a long time to grow and produce fruit. The other thing we’ve learned is to keep the consumer experience in the forefront. It can be the prettiest apple or the cheapest apple, but if consumers don’t like it, they won’t look for it again.

Q: Why does there seem to be so much more variation in the quality of Honeycrisp apples today than even a few years ago? Does it have to do with the fact that they’re now being planted all over the country?

A: The Honeycrisp generally is not very happy in warm places. It was born and bred here in Minnesota. It likes a nice, cool climate when it’s ripening its fruit here in the late summer and fall. As they grow it further south and out west in some warm spots, the quality is sometimes not as good. Also, it’s being planted like crazy. Growers harvested a lot of fruit off of young trees that were still kind of gangly adolescents; they weren’t maturing real good fruit. But of course, consumers loved it and were not at least initially discerning. The quality is probably going to get better now as supply is catching up with demand.

Q: What is the next Honeycrisp to come out of the U’s orchard?

A: My favorite apple is SweeTango, which has been around for a few years. The variety we just introduced last year, which will be called Kudos, is one that I hope people will try and will like, as well. It’s got a crisp, juicy texture that Honeycrisp has, with an intense, interesting kind of tropical flavor. It’s very sweet and fruity. Honeycrisp was the mother on that one. Many of the varieties coming onto the market now, even if they aren’t ours, are the children of Honeycrisp.