Barritt is bullish on the Cosmic Crisp’s
commercial prospects. Flavor and tex-
ture aside, it’s also resilient, able to stay
in good shape for up to 12 months after
being harvested and put into storage.
That might make it popular with shop-
pers sick of throwing away uneaten fruit.
Indeed, a sample of Cosmic Crisp
apples sent to TIME was harvested last
year and put into cold storage in March.
A few were bruised, but they were crisp
and flavorful. And while they taste simi-
lar to other sweet apples, the flesh breaks
away cleanly and requires little chewing
before breaking down into a pleasant,
juicy experience.
The Cosmic Crisp will have plenty of
competition. Other new apple varieties,
like the Ludacrisp and Summerset, are
also on the way. But the WSU team isn’t
done. An entirely new line of apples is in
what Evans calls the “advanced selection
phase,” with consumer testing to begin
next spring. “The breeding program
didn’t stop after we did the crossing in
1997,” she says. “It’s a conveyor belt of
stuff moving forward.” Bruce BarriTT saw The dilemma
coming more than 30 years ago. Wash-
ington State’s apple growers were fix-
ated on a single species, the Red Deli-
cious, which made up 70% of the state’s
apple production in 1988. But like a
prudent investor, Barritt knew the
importance of the mix in a portfolio,
as well as in metaphors. “I just felt like
they put all their eggs in one basket,”
he says. “That cash cow wasn’t going to
last forever.” He was right: production
of the Red Delicious, which critics say is
always red but rarely delicious, fell 11%
from 2017 to 2018, according to the U.S.
Apple Association.
Barritt advocated for the state to
look beyond its star product—a task
akin to talking the capital-A Apple into
moving past the iPhone. But in 1994,
Washington State University (WSU)
began a breeding program led by Bar-
ritt, and his team set off on a quest to
build a better apple.
Decades later, the fruit of their
labors is ready for picking: apple variety
WA38, better known as the Cosmic
Crisp, thanks to a starry pattern on
its skin formed by small pores called
lenticels. To hear Barritt describe the
Cosmic Crisp is to hear an artist who’s
clearly proud of his work.
“It’s when you get your teeth into the
apple and you try to pull away and hear
a cracking sound—an acoustic charac-
teristic,” he says, describing what makes
an ideal apple. Texture and moisture are
also key—you want a firm, crisp apple
with a juiciness that renders the experi-
ence of eating it “very pleasant.” Barritt
believes Cosmic Crisp is a triple threat.
“There just isn’t another variety that has
all three of those things at once,” he says.
Funded by WSU and Washington
apple growers, Barritt’s team spent
years producing thousands of hybrid
seeds, then sampling the resulting
apples. “Less than 1% are any good,”
Barritt says. “But one or two will be, and
that’s how you come up with the Cosmic
Crisp.” In 1997, the team made a cross of
Honeycrisp and Enterprise apples that
The apple event
of the year
By Mahita Gajanan
TimeOff Food
resulted in what they were looking for.
About five years later, they saw the fruit
that would become the Cosmic Crisp.
Twelve million Cosmic Crisp trees
have since been planted, and 18 mil-
lion pounds of the apples are set to ship
across the country in December alone.This apple could be a “game
changer” for the industry, says Robert
Crassweller, a horticulture professor at
Penn State University. “This is the first
time anyone has made such a concerted
effort to develop a variety, release it and
commit to such a large quantity,” he
says. “Usually an apple comes along and
gradually builds up in the market.”
The Cosmic Crisp could be a lifesaver
for Washington apple growers in particu-
lar. Unlike Gala and Fuji apples, which
were developed outside of the U.S., the
Cosmic Crisp was designed specifically to
excel in Washington State’s climate, says
Kate Evans, who took over the WSU pro-
gram after Barritt retired in 2008. Wash-
ington apple growers will have exclusive
rights to the Cosmic Crisp for 10 years.KIM
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BE
LLO
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IME
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The Cosmic Crisp
took two decades
to develop from
start to finish. “It’s
biology, basically,”
says Barritt