The Red Delicious Apples – What Happened?, Spotlight

June 10,2024

The nicest thing you can say about Red Delicious apples is that they are uniformly red. That wasn’t always the case. Between 1910 and 2018 the Red Delicious was the best-selling apple in the United States until it was replaced by Gala apples. The story begins in the middle of the 19th century with the Ben Davis apple which originated in Kentucky as a seedling and was later grafted as growers realized its potential. It was a reliable cropper and dependably produced year in and year out. It bloomed later in the spring and thus often escaped late freezes. It had an appealing red color; a tough outer skin and it kept well under marginal conditions. In pre-refrigeration days, apples that stayed firm for several months in a fruit cellar were prized. What the apple didn’t have was great flavor. One well-known fruit explorer once said that eating a Ben Davis was like eating cardboard, and even when he sprinkled it with a little salt, as a friend recommended, it tasted like eating salted cardboard. Yet it was a hugely successful apple and was often called the “mortgage lifter” for its reliability and consumer appeal. A 1922 survey of Delta County apples counted almost 75,000 Ben Davis apples trees in the county, second only behind Jonathan.