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Narciso Cruz picks Red Delicious apples in an orchard near Yakima in 2017.
Freshly picked Red Delicious apples share bin space after being picked from an orchard near Chelan.
Narciso Cruz picks Red Delicious apples in an orchard near Yakima in 2017.
Here is Rob Hoglund, 61, now an IT analyst in Rancho Mirage, California, but who as a kid lived here. This summer, in Gig Harbor, he had a reunion with some school friends.
Remembering the old times, they somehow started talking about the Red Delicious apple, a staple then and now in school cafeterias. Oh, how they hated them.
In an email, Hoglund amplifies:
“I haven’t bought a Red Delicious apple nor have I eaten one since they were foisted upon the children of Western Washington at every turn as a lazy, cheap way to get fruit into us. Mealy, tough-skinned, cloyingly sweet, I can still smell them decomposing in fruit bowls across Pierce County where I grew up and distinctively remember my thumb sinking into the brown soft spots when I was hungry enough to eat one. I think they are responsible for turning me off to apples for life until just recently, where newer varieties are more palatable, i.e., Cosmic Crisp.”
How can an apple generate such derision? The Red Delicious does.
The Reds, as they’re called in the industry, reigned as Washington state’s top apple in sales for nearly eight decades.
But amid dissatisfaction from so, so many like Rob Hoglund, the Red Delicious tumbled from its No. 1 spot in 2017 as a host of new varieties poured into supermarkets.
Now in the midst of apple-picking season in this state’s commercial orchards, Gala, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, Fuji and Cosmic Crisp will be among the many popular varieties picked.
But, hey, you Delicious disparagers out there, don’t be too smug. The variety that drove Washington’s apple economy is down, but not out. Red Delicious is a survivor. With sales to schools and other institutions, sales abroad and to a longtime base of loyal individuals, the Reds are tied at No. 2 with Honeycrisps at 14% of the projected 2022 harvest, according to the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. No. 1 is the Gala at 20%.
Hoglund’s was one of many responses to our call-out for readers and how they feel about the Red Delicious. Back in the day, when you drove around Eastern Washington, all you saw were the Reds orchards.
From the Apple Cup in the Huskies-Cougars football rivalry, to the now- collector’s items colorful labels once glued on the ends of old-time wooden crates, to governors posing for publicity photos with apples, they are part of our identity.
Apples are this state’s No. 1 agricultural crop, in 2021 at 6.8 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 80% as fresh apples and the rest as juice, sauce and other processing.
That’s two-thirds of all apples produced in the U. S.
But by 2017, statistics showed consumers had found numerous other apple varieties to like.
That year, the Red Delicious share dropped to 22%, says the USDA, a precipitous fall from its heyday when, beginning in 1940, it ruled as the state’s top apple crop.
In the 1980s, it accounted for more than half — and at one point 75% — of the state’s apple crop, according to the Washington Apple Commission.
A New York Times headline the next year, on Aug. 29, 2018, was positively jubilant at the downfall: “The long, monstrous reign of the Red Delicious apple is ending.”
Why the delight about the apparent impending demise?
The story quoted the late Tom Burford, an apple historian and himself a Virginia orchardist.
“We started eating with our eyes and not our mouths,” he said.
By that he meant how the Red Delicious was marketed.
The Red Delicious started out in the 1870s as a mutant seedling in the orchard of Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, explains a Sept. 10, 2014, story in The Atlantic. The headline with the story carried on the tradition of slamming this apple: “The awful reign of the Red Delicious.”
Freshly picked Red Delicious apples share bin space after being picked from an orchard near Chelan.
Hiatt kept chopping down the seedling, but it kept coming back. He decided to give it a chance. It produced an elongated fruit with red-and-gold skin, crisp and with a five-pointed bottom.
Hiatt entered it in a contest in 1893 run by Stark Bro’s Nurseries & Orchards in Louisiana, Missouri. “My, that’s delicious,” the company’s president reportedly said, and secured the rights.
The apple went from originally being called the Hawkeye, to Stark Delicious, to finally Red Delicious to differentiate it from the Golden Delicious.
The marketing of the Red Delicious included a chance mutation in 1923 on a limb of one of the trees. It produced an apple with a deep, uniform red color, not the striped skin. Customers loved this new variety, associating its dramatic color with better taste, even though that wasn’t the case.
Over the years, growers kept cloning from apple tree limbs that produced fruit with that deep redness.
“The taste was bred out of them when skin got redder,” says Dain Craver, a longtime grower in Royal City, who has his own fruit farm and manages several others. “The skin got tougher. I always joke that we were producing potatoes.”
He’s pulled out most of his Red Delicious trees, instead planting mostly Honeycrisps.
The consumer revolt had begun.
“Consumers vote with their dollars,” says Joe Pulicicchio, director of produce for the six Town & Country Markets in this region. “We haven’t carried Red Delicious for 15 years. They ruined that apple. They dumbed down the flavor and it became really chewy. We’re a good produce department. We don’t carry junk.”
Don’t write off the Reds.
A quarter of the state’s total apple crop gets shipped to 30 countries around the world. The top markets are Mexico, Canada, Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia. A third of those exports are Red Delicious, says the Washington Apple Commission, which promotes apples in international markets.
Reds wholesale for a lot less than other apples, and that matters to consumers in Mexico, for example.
In Asia, “Vietnamese buy it for prayer in temple or during Tet [Lunar New Year] because of the size, color and shape. Vietnam only buys the big size Red Delicious. It looks very nice for gift,” emails Francis Lee, marketing rep there for the commission.
Then there are schools and various institutions.
Seattle Public Schools gets 6,000 pounds of apples a week, of which Red Delicious are among the four types bought.
The state’s Department of Corrections buys 4,600 pounds of apples a week, again, with Red Delicious in the mix.
And finally, there are those individuals who proudly admit to being fans of the Red Delicious.
Meet Lisa Van Houweling, of Snohomish.
“My boyfriend and his family are going to LOVE this,” she says about announcing at a get-together that she loved Reds. “I like the texture and apparently, I am all alone in this boat. You’d think I asked for pork rinds in a five-star restaurant. Everyone stopped and stared at me.”
Meet Randy Moore, of Shelton. “When I was over in Whitman College in Walla Walla some 40 years ago, I used to ride my bike out to the apple orchard and fill my backpack with the apples.
“I like all kinds of apples, but the Red Delicious that’s not been in storage for a long time is crisp, juicy, with just the right amount of tartness. And it smells like an apple to me. A lot of the new varieties don’t smell like apples. I could eat five at a sitting.”
And, finally, Meet Laura Corwin, of Bothell, married, with two daughters, ages 4 and 5: “I am a proud Seattle-born second-generation Red Delicious lover. They are such an innocent, deliciously crispy apple. I have been wholly committed to keeping this species alive, making special trips to seek them out at random Safeways, or PCC. I’ve recently realized I can’t be the only one, because Target miraculously started selling them in 3-pound bags. Sky’s the limit now.”
Knock it all you want, but you’ll have to pry Reds out of the clutching fingers of its fans.
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