—story by Ross Courtney
—image by TJ Mullinax
—graphic by Jared Johnson
Washington now grows enough WA 38 apples to fill store shelves all year, but how to do that and maintain quality standards is part of an ongoing industry debate.
In 2024, the sixth year of commercial harvest, Washington growers estimated that they had picked 12.3 million boxes of WA 38, marketed as Cosmic Crisp, for shippers to deliver throughout the year.
“We have reached the stage of critical mass, meaning that we now have year-round volume,” said Kevin Brandt, vice president of Proprietary Variety Management, or PVM, the Yakima company charged with commercializing WA 38. “The industry is now able to supply the domestic market 365 days out of the year.”
The volume would make WA 38 the sixth-largest variety by volume in Washington. It’s also one of the few cultivars to surpass its production in 2023, a near-record overall crop.
“It will be a big increase in volume, but the state will have low Honeycrisp this year,” said David Douglas, co-owner of Douglas Fruit in Pasco. A smaller Honeycrisp crop means more opportunity for WA 38, he said.
On Nov. 1, the state had an inventory of 11.6 million boxes of Honeycrisp, compared to 18.1 million boxes on the same date a year ago, according to the Washington State Tree Fruit Association. For WA 38, there were 12.3 million boxes compared with 7 million the year before.
WA 38 volume will continue to rise. New plantings are still reaching maturity, while the state planted or topworked about 1 million trees in spring 2024, Brandt said.
Because the apple was developed by Washington State University, Washington growers got a 10-year head start on any other North American grower. That period ends March 31, 2027, unless the university extends it. The apple has generated $28 million in royalties for the university, said Jeremy Tamsen, director of innovation and commercialization for WSU’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences.
The larger volume has Douglas and some other producers asking PVM to reconsider its annual release date for the current crop, which is set each year for quality control. For the 2024–25 crop season, it was Nov. 25.
The apple industry’s marketing season runs Sept. 1 through Aug. 31. To fill shelves with WA 38 year-round, shippers can deliver the previous year’s fruit in September, October and November.
But that extended season raises storage costs, and not all shippers have the capacity to carry the fruit that long, which risks periods when they can’t deliver to their customers and the resulting loss of shelf space they may not earn back from other produce that fills the gaps.
Growers argue that the industry knows enough about the apple, and most trees are now mature enough to produce quality fruit right off the tree, or at least to let shippers decide when they are good enough to sell.
“We absolutely cannot have a gap,” Douglas said.
West Mathison, CEO of Stemilt Growers, said a fixed release date made sense early in the apple’s development, giving clear guidelines for farmers dealing with juvenile trees that sometimes produced “bitter skin and tacky fruit,” he said.
Those problems have subsided as trees matured, said Mathison, a member of a WA 38 quality standards advisory committee for PVM.
Now that the industry understands the apple better, it’s time to adjust to something more nuanced than a calendar date, perhaps sugar, starch or acid requirements, he said.
Not everyone harvests at the same time, for one thing, he said. The late release date also impacts exports, further delaying that season. For example, apples shipped on Nov. 4 would arrive close to the existing release date.
“I have been supportive of the release date,” Mathison said. “It was the best solution at the time. We know more now than we knew then, and we can do better.”
Mike Hambelton of MM Orchards in Quincy, also a member of the advisory committee, would be open to replacing the release date with quality metrics, but he doesn’t want to leave the decision up to individual companies.
“Shippers in the state of Washington do a lousy job of policing themselves,” he said.
The industry has twice moved the release earlier in the fall: Nov. 8 in 2021 and Nov. 20 in 2023. It didn’t go well either time, Brandt said. Fruit flavor was inconsistent, and sugars were underdeveloped. Consumers complained, and PVM received dissatisfied phone calls and emails.
“What needs to be remembered is that when the Cosmic Crisp brand was established, the industry came together and agreed that the only way for the WA 38 apple and the Cosmic Crisp brand to succeed was through delivery of a product that brings return purchases through continuous quality and consumer satisfaction,” Brandt said. •
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