Farmers Hope New ‘Cosmic Crisp’ Will Be America’s Next Top Apple

Move over, Honeycrisp and Red Delicious: Farmers have a new apple they hope will be the next big fruit in the produce aisle, and it’s called the Cosmic Crisp.

Apple growers in Washington state — responsible for growing 70% of the country’s apples — have been planting millions of these new trees, reports NPR’s The Salt, though the apples themselves won’t be in stores until fall 2019.

The first plantings in the state will come out to five million 40-pound boxes of apples that will eventually be delivered to grocery stores. In comparison, it took Honeycrisp 20 years after its introduction to pull off that feat, The Salt points out.

“Hitting five million boxes right away, that’s never happened with any other variety that we’ve ever planted in Washington state,” one farmer told the blog.

Every Cosmic Crisp tree is a clone of one mother tree that started out as WA 38, in a research orchard funded by Washington State University’s breeding program.

Though the general public will have to wait a few years to try a Cosmic Crisp, those who have tasted it say it has that all-important crispy snap when you bite into it, as well as sweetness and acid creating an “almost a sensory overload for your tongue,” as The Salt puts it.