Growers Struggle to Make Fruit the Apple of America’s Eye

It is the essential American fruit, the fragrant, crisp expression of a collective memory: a cinnamon-scented pie emerging from the oven; a burst of tartness experienced under an autumnal blue sky; the bounty of the Tree of Knowledge that seemed worth the price of a one-way ticket out of Paradise.

“To eat an apple, to press the edge of the teeth past the taut unwilling skin into ready white meat, to feel the spray of tart and honeyed juices rain down against the tongue and wash over the palate,” Kentucky orchardist Frank Browning wrote, “was to know again how exquisite are the treasures of the ordinary earth.”

The apple--the fruit Thomas Jefferson nurtured at Monticello, the sweet temptation that lured Snow White into a poisonous sleep and became the staple of the school lunch box--has fallen on hard times.

The collapse of the Asian export market, tough trade barriers in Mexico and Japan, lofty supermarket prices--all have been cited by U.S. growers for a season so bad that as much as 5% of this year’s near-record Pacific Northwest harvest was left to rot on the trees.

Growers Selling at a Loss

But the real problem may be the consumers, especially Americans, who have cast their fickle affections toward other between-meal delights and placed the apple on a par with everything from Chilean peaches to Costa Rican bananas to, dare it be said, SnackWell’s.

American apple consumption is flat at about 20 pounds per person every year, compared to 35 pounds in Canada and 50 pounds in Europe. The result: U.S. growers produced 265.6 million boxes (at 42 pounds per box) of fresh apples this year, but faced prices as low as $15 a ton less than what it cost to pick them.

Most growers sold at a loss. Some left the fruit dangling on the trees. Some hired pickers and hauled the fruit into packinghouses--only to face a bill due after it was over, because packing and shipping cost more than the apples were worth.

In the fragrant orchards of Washington state’s Yakima, Wenatchee and Columbia valleys, which produce more than half of all American apples and 94% of those exported, there is a state of near despair.

“We can’t understand a market dying when you see apples in the store close to $1 a pound, and we’re offering apples to [supermarkets] at less than 25 cents,” said Lafe Wilson, who earlier this month opened the gates of his Clarkston orchard and offered 50 tons of apples for free.

They were gone in four hours.

To fight back, the Washington Apple Commission has launched a $23-million advertising campaign, due to hit markets across the country next month.

“Washington apples,” the announcer in one TV commercial concludes, crunching. “Just the thing.”

There is a reason people don’t seem to like apples as much anymore, say those who know the fruit, and that is because apples aren’t as good as they used to be.

The apple you’re most likely to buy at the market--the mighty Red Delicious, which comprises 40% of the U.S. apple crop (or its abundant yellow stepsister, the Golden Delicious)--isn’t the crisp, pungent fruit that endeared it to the human species.

It will be a stunning ruby red. But chances are it’s a bit mushy. It may even have a taste reminiscent of wet cardboard. All this owed to years of breeding designed to produce an apple that would be visually enticing on the grocer’s shelf, could be grown uniformly in huge volumes and would hold up under long-term storage and rigorous shipping to faraway markets.

The Red Delicious that bullied its way to dominance in the ‘40s and ‘50s is a product of the debut of the supermarkets--with their huge wholesale orders--and of consumer tastes that did not demand, indeed probably did not want, a challenging apple.

“Red Delicious came into flower when the prime breeding and marketing objective was to find ‘inoffensive tastes’ in food, tastes that would alienate no one and presumably claim the broadest possible market share,” Browning says in his new and exhaustive book, “Apples.”

“It was the era of Wonder bread, Cool Whip, Big Macs and Campbell’s condensed soup casseroles. The Washington apple--either red or yellow--was easier to market than a matrix of subtle tastes with old-fashioned names that no longer resonated with the children of the sprawling American suburbs.”

Consumers Duped, Orchardist Claims

American consumers, contends longtime Lynchburg, Va., orchardist Tom Burford, were duped into thinking the disappointing Red Delicious apples they brought home from the market were simply a bad batch.

“The shopper would come home, open the bag and dump it in the fruit bowl, pick one off the top and take one bite of it and say, ‘Oh, this isn’t very good.’ The bag would go in the trash, and the Red Delicious would go in the garbage. The same thing with lunch boxes.”

Encouraging the trend toward uniformly bland apples was the move of production from family orchards toward industrial farming. Thanks to tax law changes that encouraged absentee ownership and a lot of outside investment money, the acreage planted with apples boomed in the 1980s.

Burford, whose family has grown apples since 1713 and who is acting as a consultant for the restoration of Jefferson’s orchards at Monticello, hosts apple tastings along the East Coast in the fall--offering slices of lesser-known varieties, some old, some new, that are alternatives to the blandly sweet. Tart, juicy apples; apples that leave an uncomfortable bite at the back of the tongue; ugly, mottled apples with delicious and delicate aromas; apples that stay firm and pungent in a pie and those that melt, sweet and compliant, into applesauce and apple butter.

“I always have rating sheets. Zero is unpalatable, up to nine, which is . . . an ecstatic taste experience,” Burford said. The consistent winners? Varieties like Ashmead’s Kernel (an old English variety), Cox’s Orange Pippin (a classic English dessert fruit), Grimes Golden, the Roxbury Russet, the Golden Russet and an apple Burford calls “one of the olive apples”--an apple people either love or hate, the classic French Calville Blanc. (“Are you sure this is not a green persimmon?” someone scribbled on his rating sheet.)

Burford’s point is that U.S. growers can make money on their apples; they just have to grow the right ones. He has helped several small East Coast growers market Ashmead’s Kernel apples at $1 apiece to high-end urban retailers, who will sell them at $2 to $3 an apple.

Washington state growers started getting the message sometime back in the ‘80s, after pioneer grower Grady Auvil got behind the Granny Smith.

Met with an enthusiastic consumer response, growers followed up with the increasingly popular Fujis and Galas--also sought after in the Asian export market, which became an important outlet when American sales faltered amid the demand for other snack foods.

But the recent economic downturn has dried up formerly healthy markets in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia--and the Asia quandary could become even more enduring.

China in recent years has become a robust supplier of apples, and can deliver at $5 to $10 a box a cheap alternative to Washington Fujis imports, which typically run $14 to $17 a box. Moreover, China has flooded the U.S. with cheap apple juice concentrate, sending juice prices plummeting from a high of $180 a ton to the current price of $10.

“It’s pretty easy to see if we get into a price war with China, we’re going to lose,” said Jim Thomas, spokesman for the Washington Apple Commission.

“But we still enjoy a tremendous quality advantage over China,” he said. “If we stick to our standards, if we . . . deliver that really crunchy, really juicy, really good-looking piece of fruit, even in a down economy, we’re going to have that upper niche.”

Producing a Better Apple

The message going out to growers: Deliver a better product.

“If we’re going to maintain our market share for our No. 1 apple [the Red Delicious], we’re going to have to do a better job of quality control,” Thomas said. “If we’re going to go through the effort of developing a consumer advertising campaign, and get people’s mouths watering for Washington state apples when they go to the grocery store, we have to deliver on the promise.”

The growers, apparently, are listening.

Richard Thomason, a Brewster, Wash., grower, said his father made money on Red Delicious apples for more than 30 years. No more. Thomason has pulled out 70 acres of his lowest-quality trees, replanting 30 acres with Fujis. He’s not certain if he’ll be able to get financing to replant the rest.

“It’s pretty depressing. . . . Here in Okanogan County, it appears that 8% to 9% of the orchards have been pushed out--where you take a big Caterpillar tractor and push the trees and wad them up and get rid of them. And there would probably be considerably more of that, but it’s a very expensive process to do.”

Wilson says the 2,000 people who started lining up at 6 a.m. for free apples--half of them Red or Golden Delicious--are proof enough that people still like apples. (By 9:30 a.m., there were 150 cars parked three abreast on the highway outside.) They just can’t afford what the supermarkets charge for them, Wilson said. Some of his customers drove from as far as 60 miles away.

“It was a free-for-all in there,” sighed Anna Kelly, who drove with her daughter-in-law from Orofino, Idaho, to grab eight boxes of free apples. “I’m a pretty hard person to push, and I got pushed out of the way. But, oh boy, we’re gonna can all these apples. We’re gonna make some apple crisp out of some of ‘em, apple pies.”