It’s crunch time for Honeycrisp apples

LYNDEN — They are crisp, juicy, and just a little bit tart. Big ones can grow to the size of a baby’s head. They are Honeycrisp apples, and they are available fresh locally for only a few more weeks.

Local grower Bellewood Farms will likely have Honeycrisps this weekend, and “there’s a slight chance that they will go all the way to the end of the month,” owner Eric Abel said of the orchard’s U-pick season.

Local Honeycrisp seekers used to wind up empty-handed in the weeks following Washington’s apple harvest, which generally lasts from mid-August to the end of October.

The challenge of growing and storing the popular variety used to put a seasonal limit on its availability, but advances in Honeycrisp storage — as well as growers’ widespread adoption of its offspring apple, the Washington State University-bred Cosmic Crisp — have made its hallmark sweetness and crunch available almost year-round.

Washington produces about 60 percent of the U.S. apple crop, but consumer demand cannot match the state’s production in September and October only, said Kate Evans, professor of horticulture at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research & Extension Center in Wenatchee.

“Consumers want to eat apples for 12 months of the year,” Evans said, “so this industry has a lot of storage infrastructure and they’ve invested an awful lot in research into storage protocols that keep the fruit tasting really good.”

From orchard to grocery store, the flavor of a picked apple changes constantly. As an apple ripens, the starches in its flesh turn into sugars, making it taste sweet and balanced, but not for long.

An apple’s metabolism will continue to function even after it leaves the tree, Evans said. To fuel this process, the fruit uses up its store of certain acids that add tartness to its flavor. As those decline, an apple’s taste can come to seem imbalanced and overly sweet.

Likewise, an apple’s structure deteriorates with time.

“Texturally, most apples will get softer in storage,” Evans said. The cell walls in an apple’s flesh start to degrade, which affects both the hardness and the crispness of the apple’s flesh. They can lose their crunch and offer a less pleasant bite.

After harvest, Honeycrisp apples can present more challenges. Browning often occurs on their skin and in their flesh. Due to their softness, Honeycrisps also bruise easily when handled, said Carolina Torres, associate professor and endowed chair in Tree Fruit Postharvest Systems at WSU.

“When the browning is small, it doesn’t affect the fruit taste and the apples should be OK to eat, but people don’t want to buy them, so it’s a whole issue,” Torres said.

Due to these defects, and also because of a disorder known as bitter pit, in which small spots on the apple turn brown and die, only about 50 percent of Honeycrisp apples grown in Washington make it out of the orchard. At such low pack-out rates, growers can struggle to reach profitability, Evans said. They also produce a lot of food waste.

The Honeycrisp apple variety hails from a research center at the University of Minnesota. Researchers there designed the apple to flourish under that state’s particular growing conditions, said Karina Gallardo, WSU economics professor and extension specialist at the university’s Puyallup Research and Extension Center.

“What prevents people from getting into the Honeycrisp market is the difficulty of producing it. You have to be a really good horticulturist to be able to produce Honeycrisp in Washington state conditions,” Gallardo said.

Locally, Bellewood Farms represents one of those operations. Honeycrisps make up about 50 percent of the trees that it cultivates across its 62 acres of orchard in Lynden and Ferndale. They sell the apples fresh, as cider, and as dried apple chips, and still have enough to put some in cold storage, sell others in regional grocery stores through a distributor, and send off more to a packing house.

“They are a little persnickety,” Abel said of Honeycrisps. “You have to watch them. They’re maybe not quite as hardy as other varieties, but we usually don’t have issues. It all comes down to your program, and we have a good program.”

Honeycrisp begets Cosmic Crisp, an easier and sturdier offspring

In recent years, a child of the Honeycrisp has popped up in orchards and produce sections. Designed to retain the sweetness, tartness, and crunch of the Honeycrisp, but also to grow well in Central Washington and keep well in storage, the Cosmic Crisp apple variety has been adopted at an unprecedented rate, Gallardo said.

“Cosmic Crisp is one of these really good apples that can hold quality for the entire year. Some apples bruise easily, right? The Cosmic Crisp is not one of those. It can hold quality for a long time, which gives the packing house a lot of flexibility in terms of their logistics,” Gallardo said.

Torres said pack-out rates for Cosmic Crisp apples hover between 80–90 percent — significantly higher than growers often achieve with Honeycrisps. Because of their origin, Cosmic Crisp apple trees will be exclusively available to Washington growers until 2028.

“It is just a very easy-to-manage piece of fruit,” Torres said.

Most of Washington’s 2023 Cosmic Crisp and Honeycrisp crops currently sit in packing houses, ripening under controlled conditions. Cosmic Crisp apples will leave the packing houses in late November or early December, Torres said, with Honeycrisps reaching peak ripeness a few weeks earlier.

Call it a second autumn: ripe apples at the end of fall.