Today's fresh apples could be a year old: Surprising apple facts

Today's apples don't grow on towering trees, could have been picked in 2023, and taste way different than they used to.

And that's just the beginning of the surprising modern reality of a quintessentially American fruit ‒ one that captures our imagination each fall with apple-picking, apple cider doughnuts and apple pie.

Today's juicy Honeycrisps, sweet Fujis, crunchy SweeTangos or tart-ish Pink Ladies are the product of bewildering scientific and agricultural innovations. Orchards of today ‒ filled with short, trellised trees harvested by people on self-driving platforms or sometimes even robots ‒ sound like the stuff of science fiction.

But apple fundamentals have stayed the same. Apples remain a healthy, nutritious snack, low in calories, high in fiber and vitamin C. Eat them peel-on to get the most of their fiber and antioxidants.

USA TODAY spoke with apple breeders, growers, packers and researchers to find out the secrets of one of America's most popular fruits. Here's what we learned:

Apple orchards look more like vineyards than forests

A modern apple orchard looks nothing like the towering, pink blossomed trees of story books. And Johnny Appleseed would find no takers for his offerings.

“The thing most people find surprising is just what the orchards look like,” said Amanda Van Lanen, a history professor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, and author of “The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture.”

“You say ‘orchard’ and people have this pastoral orchard in their head.”

Modern apples are not grown from seeds but from scions (buds) grafted onto semi-dwarf or dwarf rootstock from disease-resistant strains. The trees grow to only 10 to 11 feet tall. As many as 1,300 to 1,500 can be planted per acre.

The trees are also trained to grow along wire trellises. That's in part to protect them from falling over in a severe windstorm, said Dave Gleason, a horticulturist in Washington state whose been working with apples since the 1960s.

The shift to this kind of shaping began in the late 1970s, in part to allow easier pruning and picking, he said.

Apple picking has gone high-tech

Fall revelers may pay a premium to wander orchards to handpick apples, but that's not how the pros do it anymore.

“Back in the day you had to know how to climb down a 14-foot ladder with a 40- to 50-pound bag of apples and not bruise or hurt the fruit,” Gleason said.

“Labor is now 75% of our costs,” he said, and finding experienced pickers to keep fruit in good shape is harder every year.

Today, many orchards use self-driving harvest-assist platforms that slowly drive down the rows. Arms on either side reach out to touch the trees on either side to keep it in the center, Gleason said. "The people just fill their bag and put it in the bin. It simplifies things," he said.

In late October, he attended a demonstration of a robotic apple picker that could pluck 4,000 pieces of fruit an hour. A good human picker can do about 2,000.

Grocery stores only recently started stocking a variety of apples

Not so long ago, most American supermarkets sold only a few apple varieties – Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and Granny Smiths.

“It was red, yellow and green. That was it,” said Carolina Torres, a professor and chair in tree fruit post harvest technology at Washington State University.

But apples have a long history of being far more diverse than that. At one time, the U.S. boasted as many as 17,000 apple varieties, according to "The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada." Those were mostly grown and sold locally.

It was only in the 1980s that more apple varieties began to be consistently available nationwide. The Granny Smith from Australia and the Gala from New Zealand became available in the 1970s. The Fuji, from Japan, arrived in the 1980s. Then the Honeycrisp from Minnesota and the Pink Lady (also known as a Cripps Pink) from Australia hit like rock star apples in the 1990s.

More:How many varieties of apples are there? A visual guide to apple-picking season

“But the abundance of apple varieties that grace most supermarkets only came about after 2010,” Van Lanen said.

A trip to even an average American supermarket today is likely to turn up many new varieties, such as Cosmic Crisp, SnapDragon, Opal, Ruby Frost, SweeTango, Sonata, Jazz and Envy.

“It’s really in the last 20 years that we started to see the explosion of different varieties,” she said.

One state dominates the apple business

Washington state produces 68% of the apples grown in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It dominates in part because because the state's dry eastern portion has an excellent climate for the fruit.

“We have very low humidity because we’re irrigated desert,” said Kate Evans, a professor of horticulture in the Washington State University Tree Fruit Research & Extension Center. “Because of that we don’t have the problems that many production areas have, which is particularly important for fungal diseases.”

The area also has excellent apple growing weather, cold winters to give trees a winter chilling period (essential to the formation of flower buds), then sunny summers and falls.

“The differential in the temperature between day and night as we hit the end of summer and into fall stimulates great color on the fruit and helps us to get our fruit to mature in a very attractive way,” Evans said.

Washington even has its own apple grading standard, with one grade above USDA's U.S. Extra Fancy – Washington Extra Fancy. About 25% to 30% of its apple crop is exported; most goes to Canada and Mexico.

Apples represent 16% of the state's agricultural production and are so important that in 2020 the state created a Washington Apple license plate.

Many apples are picked and stored for a year or more

Today, apples are picked, cleaned and then placed in controlled atmosphere nitrogen-filled storage rooms where oxygen levels are typically 1% to 3%.

“That’s the beauty of apples, you can store them for 12 to 15 months and when the consumer buys them, they taste like they were just harvested,” said Torres, of Washington State University.

As the apples respire they give off carbon dioxide, which is removed to keep levels at no more than 1%. The temperature is also strictly regulated, generally 33 to 38 degrees, depending on the variety.

Those storage rooms typically hold 1,500 to 3,000 bins of apples, each of which holds almost 900 pounds of fruit.

“If they mess up a room, it’s a lot of money. It could be millions lost,” Torres said.

Americans once soured on apples

Apples were a favorite fruit for decades in America, until World War II turned many away from the red globes.

The best apples were sold to the military for the nation’s fighting men. Expert pickers and packers were called to war work, leaving often bruised and less-than-ideal fruit for grocery stores on the home front.

“It really hurt the reputation, because the apples that were left for civilian consumption weren’t very good,” Van Lanen said.

It took much of the 1950s to bring consumers back to apples amid a concerted advertising push on behalf of apple growers to reintroduce consumers to the fruit.

Americans like sweet apples, Europeans like tart

There’s a clear difference in tastes for apples in Europe, said Stefano Musacchi, a professor of pomology and endowed chair of Tree Fruit Physiology and Management at Washington State University, who originally hails from Italy.

“In Europe, all the Mediterranean people like sweet fruit. In northern Europe they like tart fruit. This is why Fuji is so popular in Italy, as well as Gala. In Holland there are other varieties like Jonagold that are more popular because they’re more tart and more acid,” he said.

American Much prefer sweet apples to tart, said Musacchi.

But Gleason says American tastes are starting to change. "It's still primarily sweet, but people are looking for more complexity," he said. He attributes that to the introduction of so many new, more interesting apples in the past several decades.

"Once you get introduced to them, you're looking for something that teases your palate."

Apples should be refrigerated

Apples have a surprisingly long shelf life, even once they’re out of cold storage – but put them in the refrigerator when you buy them to keep them at their best.

Once out in the air, which is 21% oxygen, “everything goes fast,” said Torres. “The texture, the sugars, the acid. The fruit won’t be good.”

For an apple grown in Washington state, it takes five to six days to be trucked to the East Coast once it’s removed from the storage room.

Once in a supermarket produce section, they are good for about seven days. Once they’re purchased, as long as they’re put in the fridge, they’ll last another two weeks, Torres said.

“The low temperature reduces the rate of respiration. The higher the temperature, the higher their respiration. And when they’re respirating, it’s the sugars and acids that are the first to go.”

Apples were once a seasonal treat

Fresh apples all year has been something consumers could depend on only since the 1960s with the widespread advent of controlled refrigerated storage, said Van Lanen of Lewis-Clark State College.

“Before World War II, apple juice was a seasonal treat, partly because they didn’t have the technology to freeze it or can it and preserve all the flavor compounds, so the flavors would go very flat,” Van Lanen said.

Instead, 19th-century Americans used apples in forms that could be more easily preserved: dried (often in pie), applesauce, apple butter or cider vinegar.

Baking apples has fallen out of favor

There used to be three kinds of apples: for eating, for baking and for cider. Today, most supermarkets stock only eating apples.

“It is very hard to find cooking apples,” Van Lanen said. “The eating apples you find in the stores don’t make the best pies. Part of that is driven by consumer tastes – we just don’t bake as much so there isn’t the demand of the good baking apple.”

The 1964 edition of "Joy of Cooking" still lists the best apples for eating uncooked, which it calls “dessert apples” and for baking, which include Courtlands, Staymans, Winesaps, Baldwins and Rome Beautys “unless they are overripe. In that condition, they become mealy.”

Today some of the best, widely available baking bets are Braeburn, Jonathan, Fuji, Gala and Granny Smith. The ideal is an apple firm enough to hold its shape but also stay tasty. For best results, many bakers suggest buying different varieties to give an apple pie or other baked treat depth of flavor.

New apples are always in development

What will the next big apple be? Perhaps the WA 64 variety, the most recent apple out of the breeding program at Washington State University's Wenatchee Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center.

WSU introduced the Cosmic Crisp variety (WA 38) in 2019, though work on breeding it began in 1997.

The new WA 64 apple variety doesn’t yet have a catchy name and won’t be in stores until 2029 or 2030, Evans said. But the breeders, who have been working on it since 1998, believe it will be popular.

“This one has a pink blush on a yellow background," Evans said. It is a cross between the Honeycrisp and Cripps Pink (also known as a Pink Lady) varieties. “I would say it has a better texture, so not quite as dense as a Cripps Pink apple.”