How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre

An investigation into the Honeycrisp apple and how a complex string of events led to a decline in the quality of a beloved apple variety.

It was a chilly Saturday morning in October, and at my local grocery store, shoppers were browsing the apple selection: piles of Gala, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Snapdragon, and Honeycrisp beckoned. I lingered over the organic Honeycrisps, pausing to look at the $3.99-per-pound price tag, before filling my produce bag with several conventional Galas, which sold for a more reasonable $1.69 per pound. Though I had my heart set on the Honeycrisps, I’d recently had one too many bland, mealy ones with none of the fruit’s signature snap and sweet, tangy flavor, and I was unsure if I was ready to take that risk again, especially given the price. 

It would have been an easier decision if Honeycrisps were as good today as they used to be. I first tasted one 10 years ago, standing at my mother-in-law’s kitchen counter in St. Louis on a cool September day. I grasped the rosy fruit she handed me and took a bite. The apple’s paper-thin skin produced an audible crunch, and a burst of sweet, tart juice immediately filled my mouth. I chewed carefully. I couldn’t recall the last time I ate an apple for pleasure, on its own—not in my hand as a grab-and-go breakfast as I rushed out of the house, not sliced up and slathered with nut butter, and not peeled, cored, chopped, and baked into a pie. The Honeycrisp apple was revelatory for me: It was an apple that I truly enjoyed eating on its own.  And I did, for several years, until I noticed that the Honeycrisp apples I bought were, with increasing frequency, a miss. There were a few good ones here and there, but I often came across Honeycrisp apples that were dry and mealy. Beyond the hefty price tag, there was little to distinguish them from other standard apple varieties. Honeycrisps from my farmers market were typically better than those I purchased from the grocery store, but even those Hudson Valley–grown apples weren’t immune. As recently as September of this year, I had several Honeycrisp apples from a local farm that were terribly mushy and flavorless, making me wonder if they had mistakenly labeled another apple variety—nothing about those apples was like the fruit I had once loved.  I’m not the only one who has noticed the fluctuation in quality. My colleagues Daniel and Megan have both had their fair share of inferior Honeycrisps in the past couple of years. I also found multiple instances of people complaining about Honeycrisp quality on Reddit: Three years ago, a user wrote that the Honeycrisp apples they bought were “unrecognizable from the big sweet apples from the late 00s and 10s.” Another user, who posted earlier this year, mourned the loss of the “super sweet and crisp” apples they were able to find 10 years ago. The Honeycrisps of today, they wrote, are “bitter and barely sweet at all" and "On top of that they aren’t crisp either!” What went wrong? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think, and it’s impossible to answer that question without looking at how the Honeycrisp apple came about—and how it shot to stardom so quickly.

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