The biggest brand launch since the Pink Lady is changing the nature of the fruit
John Gapper
The boldest launch of a new apple in two decades will soon reach US supermarkets in the form of the Cosmic Crisp. With 12m trees already growing in the state of Washington and a $10m marketing budget, there has been nothing quite like it since the Pink Lady apple emerged from Australia.
“It is enormously crunchy and wipe-your-face juicy,” says Kathryn Grandy, director of marketing for Proprietary Variety Management, the US company in charge of launching the Cosmic Crisp. “Imagine the Possibilities”, is the tagline for the attempt by growers in the biggest apple-producing state in the US to rival Braeburns and Galas.
The new apple’s marketing budget is minuscule compared with the sum Apple spends on iPhones. But the Cosmic Crisp, so named because someone in a focus group compared the light spots on its glossy red skin to the night skies, is the latest effort by fruit farmers to capture the loyalty of consumers.
In these days of farmers’ markets and the rush to make products more authentic and craft-like, branding an apple feels like an odd strategy, even if the Cosmic Crisp is in most regards as natural as the Cox’s Orange Pippin, a British apple dating back to 1830. Both were crossed from other varieties, not genetically engineered.
But apple farmers have discovered that it pays to have their own brands. The Pink Lady, which was first trademarked in Australia in 1992, is based on the Cripps Pink, a variety created 20 years before. Most shoppers still know it as the former and will tolerate its higher price.
Branding gives growers some pricing power against supermarkets, rather than always being at the latter’s mercy. Although shoppers can distinguish varieties of apples (more than with plums or peaches), the common varieties are so readily available from growers around the world that retailers can pick the cheapest supplier.
The usefulness of a brand means that the WA38, a variety developed at Washington State University in 1997 and patented in 2014, is being launched as the Cosmic Crisp. The state’s farmers have replanted orchards from Red Delicious, a venerable apple that has lost popularity. “We have never had an apple of our own,” says Ms Grandy.
Like other new fruits, the WA38 is shielded by patents, and the university gains a royalty from the sale of every tree. But this is not the only way in which it is controlled. It is a managed variety — protected by trademarks as well as patents, with only selected farmers being licensed to grow it according to set standards.
The right to produce the Cosmic Crisp is confined to farmers in Washington until 2024 and may then be extended until 2034, when the patent on the fruit variety will run out. The state hopes that the Cosmic Crisp brand will by then have gained a value that outlasts its patents, as the Pink Lady did.
The cautionary tale is the Honeycrisp, released in 1991 by the University of Minnesota as an open variety that anyone could grow if they paid the royalty. The Honeycrisp is among the most popular US apples, and one of the varieties crossed to make the Cosmic Crisp, but its US patent protection expired in 2008 and it was not trademarked.
That has made universities and the farmers around them eager to manage and brand their most promising new varieties. The University of Minnesota has produced the SweeTango and Cornell University the SnapDragon. The brands now jostling for recognition include Pazazz, Rave, and the Midwest Apple Improvement Association’s Ludacrisp.
This competition is one reason for the size and speed of the Cosmic Crisp launch. Washington wants to use its farming capacity and marketing clout to develop the brand as fast as possible. This could both boost revenues while the variety is under patent and overpower the emerging rivals.
There is a danger that apples become so efficiently cultivated that they lose the fruit’s essence. The Cosmic Crisp is the ultimate expression of today’s approach, with its consistent appearance, balance of sweetness and tartness, and the crispness and juiciness characteristic of the modern apple.
The Cosmic Crisp also suits farmers. Its flesh does not bruise or turn brown easily and it can be stored for up to a year after harvesting so that it remains on supermarket shelves. The trees are grown from dwarfing rootstock that lets farmers fit more than 1,000 to an acre, lined up neatly in rows. Today’s apple orchards bear little resemblance to the image in people’s minds.
Farmers can hardly be blamed for responding to the market in this way — they have limited choice, given consumer preferences and the buying strength of supermarkets. The Cosmic Crisp is perfectly adapted to what retailers and shoppers want, wrapped in a trademark to make it profitable.
In the future, the consumer could tire of what has been made for him and her — the unnerving consistency of fruits that always taste the same, with a crispness that takes months to fade.
They may miss their old quests for apples in season, and the unpredictable pleasures of the first bite. Until then, here is the Cosmic Crisp.
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