The Red Prince apple was launched with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for the red carpet: Press packages were sent to the media featuring a perfect specimen perched on a red throne-like pillow. A Facebook fan page was set up for people to connect with the fruit. On Twitter, you can follow all breaking Red Prince news. Grown for the first time in Canada and now available in some supermarkets, the apple is being pitched by a Toronto public relations firm as the next best thing in the produce department.
The message: Move over, Honeycrisp.
These days, an apple is no longer an apple. In the highly competitive global food industry, each new variety is a brand backed by years of research and heaps of money that growers hope will translate into a hit apple, rather than a fruit ignored by shoppers.
“You have to be ahead of the game,” says Dela Erith, executive director of the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers’ Association. “It’s like a new Hollywood star. You can’t work on that person or thing forever. It’s going to deplete. You’ve got to keep moving forward.”
The Red Prince is a novelty. It’s a crisp apple that reaches its best balance of tartness and sweetness in the winter, a time when most other Canadian apples that were harvested in the fall lose their lustre. Irma and Marius Botden brought the apple here from Europe, where it was developed, and they hold the exclusive rights to grow it in Canada. It’s called a “club” apple, which means the Botdens must pay royalties to grow it, can only produce as much as their contract allows and if other farmers in this country want to try it out, they must buy the trees from the Botdens’ orchard.
Canada used to grow a lot more apples. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006 farmers here produced 376,459 tonnes of apples, the smallest amount in almost 50 years. Many growers in Ontario have been pulling out their apple trees because they can’t compete with the United States, New Zealand and China. New varieties, such as Honeycrisp, and a growing interest in local food has brought the numbers back up slightly. Now the hope is that cultivars such as the Red Prince may help improve the market even more – and allow growers to differentiate themselves from the horde. It's hard to stand out with a ubiquitous Red Delicious, but not every orchard grows the club varieties.
The Honeycrisp is the country's reigning star apple, Ms. Erith says. It was bred in the 1970s at the University of Minnesota but wasn’t popular until a handful of growers planted the trees in Nova Scotia in the mid-1990s. Slowly, it started to gain some attention. News of the apple spread by word of mouth, and by 2005, consumers couldn’t get enough of the Honeycrisp.
“It just grew. People liked the apple and they demanded it,” Ms. Erith says.
Even though it costs more money to grow a Honeycrisp – its delicate skin requires that each stem be snipped by hand as it is picked – growers like the apple because they can charge a premium for it. (Honeycrisps from the United States are currently $2.99 a pound in some grocery stores.) In Nova Scotia, where the variety grows well because of the maritime weather conditions, a government-funded replant program is under way to replace older trees with new ones, such as the Honeycrisp.
