Oh, good, thanks for posting this - I had the article from The Province on my table, was going to get around to posting a link to it. I can't find the article on The Province website, but it cites Harriet Alexander at the London Sunday Telegraph. Here is an article from there: Meet Cosmic Crisp - the apple with the most expensive marketing campaign in history. I don't think the world needs anything better than Honeycrisp, but in late spring before peaches are ready, Honeycrisp are no longer crisp. The bit that interested me - Edited - I seem to have deleted the Wikipedia link: Cosmic Crisp - Wikipedia
According to the article in the original post: Has anyone in the Vancouver area encountered this new apple?
Yes, we had it last week. We thought it turned brownish relatively quickly. Taste was good, it was a "solid" apple.
Save-On-Foods is selling Cosmic Crisp apple pies this week for $7.99. It's the first time I've seen this variety used in their pies.
So double the price of organic Honeycrisp, or was that not the per pound price? It would be hard for them to be twice as good. Honeycrisp is my favourite.
Oh, sorry, I didn't notice that of course. I don't remember seeing the apples. I wonder if they're grown locally. OK, looked them up. They were developed at Washington State University in Wenatchee and were available starting in 2019. Wikipedia makes them sound wonderful: Cosmic Crisp - Wikipedia, but the next hit I got totally panned them: Cosmic Crisp Apple Review - Apple Rankings by The Appleist Brian Frange. But then the next review I read highly praised them: "No other tested apples got the rhapsodic reviews the Cosmic Crisp inspired." That was at We Taste-Tested the New Cosmic Crisp Apple to See If It's Worth the Hype.
I read the same review. Differences in opinion is to be expected. After all, taste is in the beholder of the taste buds and is therefore totally subjective. Still, this variety seems to garner mostly positive reviews. I thought readers may want to taste it in a pie rather than fresh as it apparently tastes different when cooked.
Here in Washington, I've tried it from organic groceries a couple times. Didn't notice a particularly high price but I did notice a turgid texture and uninteresting flavor. Don't know if both purchases came from the same supplier - who apparently did not have good results from how they handled them - or if it is just not performing as promised. Otherwise, here in the US anyway there is currently a significant apple overproduction problem with prices for apples being gotten by orchards so low that some are shifting to other crops.
I'm doing my best, eating one a day. The price at the farmers market in my Vancouver, BC neighbourhood was as high as ever. The farmers have had a tough year - no peaches at all, and my apple vendor usually sells lots of those. I don't know what the commercial growers were able to do about the closing of the BC Tree Fruits Cooperative. Well, it's written up at BC Tree Fruits Cooperative - Wikipedia. One of the reasons cited for the closure was "extremely low estimated fruit volumes".
When I was buying apples at Superstore this summer, the Cosmic Crisp variety was often on sale for a lower price than most of the other varieties. I found that its taste was variable, sometimes fairly bland, but quite good most times; the texture was crisp, as advertised. I noticed that it doesn't brown much after being cut. Since September we've been eating home-grown apples, and I don't know what the price has been lately.
I'm not familiar with their prices as I don't usually buy apples but it seems like Cosmic Crisp has been relegated to being just one of the apples judging by its price. Today, the majority of apples at the local T&T Supermarket, including Cosmic Crisp, is selling for $1.98/lb.
The abundance of apples in the US is stretching a lesser known federal program : The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR
