The University of Minnesota’s U.S. patent on the Honeycrisp, the “iPod of apples” will expire next fall, making this the school’s last year to earn anything off sales of the tree. Plant patents last 20 years from the date the patent is filed. The school receives a patent payment of $1.30 for every tree sold to commercial and home orchards. So far, it has made $6 million in royalties off of the tree, making it one of the school’s five highest earning patents. Over the next year, the school expects to make another $2 million off of Honeycrisp.

Honeycrisp is often called the antidote to the relatively one-note Red Delicious, the glossy red apple that was so overproduced it almost took down the entire apple industry. (Adrian Higgins wrote an excellent story on the Red Delicious’s decline for the Washington Post.)

A handsome apple, if not consistently spit-shined, the Honeycrisp possesses all the qualities of old-fashioned appleness that you don’t get from readily available grocery store varieties. It stays crisp forever, it’s absurdly juicy and, while the flavor is not exactly “winy,” it’s got more tartness going on than any other “sub-acid” apple. It’s not as widespread as, say, a Gala or a Jonagold, but it’s being planted in large numbers that will just get larger once the patent expires and the trees go into the public domain.

I’ve had some interesting conversations about Honeycrisp with plum and pluot growers, who always have the apple industry in the back of their minds. Like apple growers with Red Delicious, for too many years plum growers favored tasteless varieties that “looked good, shipped good but didn’t eat good.” Predictably, people quit buying plums, and now the plum industry is struggling to restore some consumer confidence in plums by focusing on flavor and growing high-sugar plums and pluots. Everybody’s hoping to find the plum equivalent of Honeycrisp and help raise demand for plums.

Interesting back story on the development of Honeycrisp: It was the result of a cross made 47 years ago (when Kennedy was president). It was evaluated for years, selected in the mid-1970s, tested for another dozen years then patented in 1988. For years, it was thought to be the offspring of a Macoun and a Honeygold apple, but genetic testing done by the school revealed that neither apple was a parent. Instead, another of the university’s patented varieties called Keepsake was one parent. The other parent is still and will probably always be unknown.

To read more about the history of Honeycrisp, visit Minnesota Harvest.
To read more about plant patents, visit the US Patent and Trademark Office.
To stay gold, Pony, read Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking.
At Serious Eats, Teri’s looking for non-pie recipes to use up a bushel of Honeycrisps.

(via Minnesota Public Radio)

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