Cosmic Crisp has been a huge topic among growers for years, and now the variety is gaining profile in the general media.

National Public Radio sent a reporter to Wenatchee, Washington, to interview growers and researchers about the apple. That’s helpful for Washington growers, who will have nine million Cosmic Crisp trees growing within three years.

WA 38 during a pre-harvest preview of the variety in Prosser, Washington on September 17, 2014. (TJ Mullinax/Good Fruit Grower)

Cosmic Crisp is exciting in several ways, for what it means to the industry and for its expected success with consumers. How marketers will engage consumers is described in our forthcoming June issue. Meanwhile, here’s what NPR said about the apple.

Get ready for a new kind of apple. It’s called Cosmic Crisp, and farmers in Washington state, who grow 70 percent of the country’s apples, are planting these trees by the millions. The apples themselves, dark red in color with tiny yellow freckles, will start showing up in stores in the fall of 2019…For almost two decades, people in the apple industry studied those trees, tasting the apples. The more they learned, the more they liked it… The flood of orders has astonished almost everybody in the industry. In fact, it’s provoking some anxiety. After all, consumers haven’t even seen Cosmic Crisp yet. Nobody really knows if they’ll like it.

Read the entire NPR article here.