Counting on the Cosmic Crisp: Washington’s premier apple at the center of turmoil

BZ CORNER, Wash. – In a remote stretch of Klickitat County in southern Washington, third-generation apple grower John Riggleman is playing a bit part in the most ambitious and highest-stakes new product rollout attempted by the United States apple industry.

Four years ago, Riggleman planted 6 acres of Cosmic Crisp, the vaunted new variety that the industry hopes will snap the apple business out of a prolonged funk. Developed by plant scientists at Washington State University, the Cosmic Crisp is a striking combination of juicy and crispy, tart and sweet.

“It’s a great apple,” Riggleman said. “It’s big, a nice dark red, and it stores well. It actually tastes better a couple months after picking.”

Washington growers have jumped on the Cosmic Crisp bandwagon in a big way, planting more than 17 million new trees since 2017. The apple has quickly climbed into the top 10 of best-selling varieties in the country.

The optimism about the new apple comes just as the industry badly needs a boost. Demand and prices are at a low ebb. Some growers, packing houses and sales offices are cutting back or shutting down permanently.

Washington has much to lose. From Brewster in the north to Zillah in the south, the state’s verdant apple belt produced an estimated 177 million bushels in 2024, more than the rest of the 49 states combined. That translates to more than $2 billion in sales. But overproduction and higher grower costs have made it difficult to make money.

“Yeah, pretty trying times in the apple business these days,” said Chris Gerlach, vice president of analytics at USApple, the industry’s national trade group. “Supply is up, exports and consumption and prices are down. At the same time, growers’ costs – particularly labor – continue to grow.”

President Trump’s tariffs pose another potential crisis. About a quarter of the U.S. apple crop historically is exported. Growers fear that if a full-blown trade war develops and other countries enact retaliatory tariffs, international sales could crater.

Meanwhile, at Huckleberry’s Natural Market on Spokane’s South Hill, the produce department is happily noting customers’ demand for new and different apples, including the Cosmic Crisp.

“It’s our biggest seller,” said Zachary Hatchett, a produce manager. “Customers are asking for them.”

Patents and piracy

At the Cosmic Crisp website – yes, it has a website – you can learn about the apple’s history, get recipes or buy branded merchandise.

There is also a toll-free phone number to report suspected unauthorized possession, planting or trafficking of the apple.

A Cosmic Crisp black market has developed.

“Apple piracy is a problem,” said Lynnell Brandt, chief executive officer of Proprietary Variety Management, the Yakima firm hired to handle the Cosmic Crisp rollout. “Some are propagating trees without permission. Some are stolen in the middle of the night.”

The Cosmic Crisp is a harbinger of profound change. These new apples are not just apples. They’re intellectual property, zealously guarded by patent and trademark lawyers.

The introduction of the Honeycrisp in 1988 marked the advent of the new era of patented apples becoming a mainstream success. The apple – a hybrid of the Macoun and Honeygold apples – was developed at the University of Minnesota.

Though it is a high-maintenance apple and given to big swings in production from year to year, some growers took to calling it the “Moneycrisp.” It is the fourth-biggest seller in the U.S.

But the Cosmic Crisp is not far behind. And the number of new varieties today is unprecedented.

Cosmic Crisp creator

Kate Evans is a horticulture professor and apple breeder at Washington State University’s Pome Fruit Research and Extension Center in Wenatchee. She’s also a bit of a rock star.

Evans has been leading the Cosmic Crisp development team since 2008. The project dates back to 1997. That was the year when the WSU plant breeders crossed a Honeycrisp with an Enterprise. The Cosmic Crisp “mother tree” was created.

Years and years of evaluation ensued.

“The only way to test an apple is to grow it and eat it,” she said. “If it passes that hurdle, there are a myriad of others. How are the yields? How does it look? Is the color and shape acceptable? How does it hold up to months in cold storage?”

The Cosmic Crisp checked nearly all the boxes.

“For me, it has always stood out for its crispness,” Evans said.

By 2017, grower demand for the new tree had reached a fever pitch. The university decided on what Evans called “a crazy marketing plan.” Rather than try to limit production and keep prices up, WSU officials decided to make the apple available to any grower in the state.

The response was overwhelming. As of this year, growers had planted more than 17 million trees.

“It’s really gratifying and scary,” Evans said.

Not to mention profitable for the university. WSU has collected about $28 million in royalties since the apple’s introduction in 2017.

Not everyone was happy with the Washington exclusive. The growers in Hood River, Oregon, found themselves on the wrong side of the Columbia River.

Devon Wells runs Walter Wells & Sons, the largest apple producer in Oregon. He has essentially boycotted the Cosmic Crisp, refusing even to put them in the family fruit stand. “If you’re not going to let me grow them, why should I sell them?” he asked. “It’s a bit of a sore point for me.”

Evans and her staff have another apple in the works – dubbed the Sunflare. A cross of the Honeycrisp and Cripps Pink, the Sunflare is scheduled to reach grocery store shelves in 2029.

The ‘Club Apple’

As the industry continues to struggle, so does the race to create the next great variety. And Jordan Wilks is hopeful he has it – the SugarBee.

Wilkes works for Regal Fruit International, a small, private company in Ephrata, Washington. He is part of the “Club Apple” movement.

It’s not just universities developing new apple varieties these days. Regal and other private companies have joined the fray. To some degree, the apple industry has come to resemble the thoroughbred horse racing business. Plant breeders mix and match different varieties with different bloodlines. A syndicate of investors provides the capital and hopes their team produces winners.

The club decides who gets to grow the new variety and how many trees they can plant. The club also charges the grower royalties.

Even in this day of carefully controlled breeding efforts, there is still a degree of random serendipity. The SugarBee was created the old-fashioned way, when an unsuspecting bee dumped a load of pollen from an unknown source into the blossom of a Honeycrisp.

Even though 50% of its parentage is unknown, the breeder recognized that the tree produced exceptional apples. He brought it to Regal, which in turn convinced some major growers of its merits.

Wilks is not the only fan of the SugarBee. Some in the industry feel the SugarBee is better than the Cosmic Crisp.

Last year, Sugarbee growers sold 1.5 million 40-pound boxes.

“I believe that outside of Envy, it is the largest club variety out there,” Wilks said. “It’s primed for tremendous growth in the years to come.”

Bad Blood in Chelan

In 2022, Paul Martinez was busily running a diversified fruit operation. He grew apples on 500 acres and was managing partner of owned and operated Frosty Packing, a fruit packing house in Yakima.

A broker approached him one day and asked for a meeting. He said he represented a large, sophisticated company that wanted into the apple industry. Specifically, they wanted to buy Frosty.

The deal was announced in October of that year. The buyer had also purchased Columbia Fruit Packers in Wenatchee and intended to merge the two companies.

The buyer was Goldman Sachs, one of the largest and most venerable investment banks on Wall Street. The company that oversaw the initial public stock offerings of Facebook and Uber. The company of former U.S. treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson. It had come to Yakima and Wenatchee with an open wallet.

The Goldman-Frosty deal was not an isolated event. Some of the biggest names in business over the past five years have staked out positions in the Northwest tree fruit business.

One of the earliest came in December 2018 when the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan purchased Broetje Orchards, a large operation in Prescott, Washington, with more than 4,000 acres of orchards and its own packing facility. Officials of the $145 billion pension fund said at the time that agriculture was a “core building block” of its investment strategy.

A year later, another of Washington’s largest operators – the Auvil family in Orondo north of Wenatchee – sold a stake of their company to Canadian private equity company Fiera Comox.

Investment firms working for Harvard University and Bill Gates invested in Washington properties.

It hasn’t always gone smoothly.

International Farming Corp., a large North Carolina diversified agriculture operator, between 2019 and 2022 purchased all or part of five Washington apple companies. One of them was the Chelan Fruit Cooperative in 2021.

International Farming beat out another bidder – a formidable local partnership of Gebbers Farms and Auvil Fruit Co. – to buy the co-op. Gebbers, one of the state’s largest apple growers, was a member of the co-op. But the co-op went with a company backed by International Farming.

The Chelan co-op had been struggling. But it was sitting on some valuable assets, including the rights to grow the SugarBee.

After the acquisition, Gebbers sued, claiming that Chelan had violated the fiduciary duty it owed to Gebbers and other members. According to court papers, Gebbers claimed its bid would have been more profitable for the co-op and accused co-op leadership of unspecified “misconduct.”

International Farming doubled down on the Chelan area months later, buying Manson Growers, another cooperative located in the town of Manson just 9 miles from Chelan.

Wilks is pained that two of his important marketing partners have turned against one another.

“There is a lot of emotion and hurt on both sides when it comes to the lawsuit,” Wilks said. “Depending on which side you are talking to, you get wildly different accounts, accusations and finger pointing.”

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs wasn’t earning a lot of love, either. Last June, it closed the Yakima packing facility it had acquired just two years before, eliminating 200 jobs.

Company officials at New Columbia said it would consolidate operations in Wenatchee.

“That kind of consolidation was never mentioned as a possibility when the deal with Goldman Sachs was being negotiated,” said Martinez, who is still steamed by the closure. “There are a lot of people who need those jobs.”

Goldman Sachs officials declined to comment.

Some highly respected voices in the Northwest tree fruit business argue there’s a connection between the current over-production and the entry into the business by a group of wealthy, powerful outsiders with no experience in the apple industry.

“These venture capital firms are coming in and really showing a lack of understanding about supply and demand,” said Todd Fryhover, the longtime head of the Washington Apple Commission who retired in November. “They’ve come in and really put us in a difficult situation right now with all the new acres in production.”

Gerlach, the USApple official, said the outside investors have little choice but to keep their operations running full tilt.

“If you invest in five storage facilities, you need to fill those up with someone’s apples to pay for it,” Gerlach said. “If you build a new line, you need to run (a certain amount of) bushels per hour over that line to cover that cost – whether the market needs those apples or not.”

Jim Divis, general manager of Honeybear Growers in Brewster, said it’s not just the the big corporate investors’ fault. Washington growers’ big problem is simply too many apples. And that falls on most growers.

“We did it to ourselves. We’re all complicit,” Divis said. State growers “can sell 110-115 million boxes at a profit. We can’t do it at 130 million boxes. And that’s where we’ve been.”

Riggleman faces a tough choice: Should he, as his father urges him, go all in on the Cosmic Crisp, which would mean digging up acres of mature Gala trees? For now, Riggleman is holding off. They may be passe, but Galas remain the top-selling apple in the country.

“That’s why I don’t play poker or gamble,” he said. “I face enough risk every day in the fruit business.”