Slicing Apples

Slicing Apples. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Not all apples hanging on fruit trees end up on display for your choice at the supermarket. Alan Taylor with Pink Lady America says that they are looking at options for the Pink Lady apple as that market grows.

TAYLOR: To start with in the Pink Lady industry we are projecting some increases in volume and that means that we’re doing some planning for 5, 10 years down the road and actually some of this is happening right now in value added products. Fruit that doesn’t necessarily make it to market because of size or some other quality problems.

According to Taylor one important option is slicing and due to the nature of the Pink Lady, it lends itself well to this market.

TAYLOR: We first went and did some market research in four different markets to see how Pink Lady slices stack up against Brand X or generic brand and in those market we were very excited to find out that they were preferred by 56% of adults over that other brand and a whopping 69% of children liked them better than the other brand.

As most of us know one downside to sliced apples is that they quickly turn brown.

TAYLOR: That’s another characteristic that Pink Lady has that makes it really fitting the sliced market in that it doesn’t turn brown very quickly, much slower than most other apples so there is a lot less need to treat it with agents that will prevent it from browning.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.