Sunday, September 14, 2025

How the classic McIntosh lost the battle for apple supremacy

Even the apple aisle has gone premium in price and taste.

BY MARK DENT

When Frank Johnson stopped seeing McIntosh apples on the shelves of his neighborhood Whole Foods a few years ago, he assumed supply chain problems caused a delay.

Johnson is hardly an apple aficionado. He’s just a Philadelphia guy who’s favored the McIntosh most of his life, relishing its appealing red and green hue, its soft — but not mushy — texture, and its ideal balance of tart and sweet.

The McIntosh apples, though, didn’t return to Whole Foods (where an employee had the nerve to recommend he try the Fuji, known for its sweetness). And no matter where Johnson shopped for groceries, he couldn’t find McIntoshes there either.

“McIntosh apples are such a part of our food culture, for hundreds of years,” he says. “So for them to disappear from stores it just struck me as odd.”

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

What happened to the McIntosh apple? In the late 20th century, it often ranked as the top-produced apple in the US behind only the Red and Golden Delicious. In parts of the Northeast and in Canada, apples and McIntosh were more or less interchangeable, like soda and Coke or beer and Budweiser.

But, as in the rest of the economy, the produce section has gone premium. Dozens of new trademarked fruit varieties are competing for shelf space based on their distinguished flavor profiles and snazzy marketing, rather than low prices. Production of the McIntosh has declined by half in the last few years alone.

Stores don’t want to sell an apple that’s just known for being an apple.

When the McIntosh was king

There was a time when the McIntosh was the apple of every grower’s eye. Charles Stevens remembers it well.

In 1975, while studying at the University of Guelph, Stevens bought a farm in Ontario, Canada, that would become Wilmot Orchards. His family had raised cows since the early 1800s, but his passion was apples. And any sensible apple grower in Ontario knew their cash crop would be the McIntosh.

“It was the number one apple,” Stevens says. “It’s what everybody made their money on.”

A couple-hundred miles east and 180 years earlier, in 1795, an Ontario farmer named John McIntosh came upon a couple dozen apple trees while clearing brush on his property. He didn’t know who’d planted them. A random passerby may have simply tossed a few seeds from the road. A bird may have dropped them from the sky.

Decades later, his son sold the apples commercially — some coming from that original tree, which bore fruit until the early 1900s — under the name McIntosh. He also offered seedlings and grafting instructions so farmers could plant their own trees.

The variety, harvested and mostly sold during autumn, quickly became Canada’s most popular apple. Stevens planted McIntosh trees on ~60% of its 150+ acre property, a typical ratio for Ontario farmers at the time, he says.

Fresh McIntosh apples from New York. (John Carl D’Annibale/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)

The eastern US got hooked on the McIntosh, too. First sold in New York City in 1900, it soared in popularity after McIntosh trees proved more resilient than Baldwin apple trees during an extreme freeze in the winter of 1934. Meanwhile, researchers were devising methods to make McIntoshes more reliable to grow and using the McIntosh to develop hybrid apples like the Cortland and Milton.

The New York State Agricultural Experiment Station wanted to create “a McIntosh apple for every day in the year,” a reporter noted in 1930.

In the late 1970s, McIntosh ranked as the second-most popular apple in the US, behind only the Red Delicious, grown mostly in Washington, the top-producing state. Even California grocery stores put out celebratory ads when the McIntosh made its way across the continent onto their shelves.

One California superfan was Jef Raskin, the 31st employee at Apple Computer. Raskin pushed for the company to make a computer designed for the everyman and named it the Macintosh, after his favorite variety of apple — a variety that had just about reached its peak.

The Honeycrisp revolution

The discovery of the apple that changed everything was almost as serendipitous as the discovery of the McIntosh. In 1974, horticulturist David Bedford came upon four trees marked for disposal in Block 53 of the University of Minnesota Horticultural Research Center, a vast orchard with ~7k seedlings.

Bedford, on a whim, decided to keep the trees. When they bore fruit, he was surprised by the apples’ crispness. Biting into one, he’d say later, felt like having “a piece of apple shrapnel in your mouth,” more akin to the crunch of a fresh watermelon than a McIntosh.

The Honeycrisp was patented in 1990 and reached supermarket shelves a few years later.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

It signaled a new age. In the past, grocery stores desired apples that looked red and shiny, believing consumers shopped with their eyes. And growers needed something durable and easy to grow to ensure they’d have a decent enough crop to turn a profit.

The Honeycrisp didn’t fit either category, but its taste and texture garnered so much interest that the variety sold for ~2x the price of more traditional apples, making it profitable in spite of its flaws.

So began an apple arms race that’s intensified over the last decade:

• Breeders use complex methods to develop sweet, crisp apples with long shelf lives that allow them to be available all year, spending years to perfect and market them. (Many other types of fruit and vegetables are also being bred to become sweeter.)
• New varieties are patented and trademarked, with “clubs” licensing to growers who pay membership fees and royalties to grow the apple. That’s opposite traditional apples like the McIntosh, which are not trademarked and anybody can grow.

The shelves of an average grocery store now have apples like the Sprizzle, Ambrosia, SweeTango, Cosmic Crisp, and many others competing to nab a spot, all while apple consumption has been relatively stagnant over the last decade.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Simply put, says Russell Steven Powell, author of America’s Apple, the Honeycrisp and the arms race it set off were “the biggest thing to hit the apple industry, certainly in the last 50 years.”

And the timing for the wave of new apples couldn’t have been worse for the McIntosh.

A few years before the Honeycrisp’s debut, in the late 1980s, studies indicated that a substance used to prevent McIntoshes from falling out of trees before they were ripe, Alar, was a carcinogen. A “60 Minutes” episode on it, featuring the image of a skull and crossbones splayed over an apple, went viral, and actor Meryl Streep headed an awareness campaign in 1989 that contributed to apple boycotts. (Later research cast doubt on whether apples treated with Alar were dangerous.)

The negative attention left many McIntosh growers in financial ruin. So did an influx of Chinese apples in the 1990s, which made the US crop less valuable on the global market and squeezed growers, particularly on family orchards in the Northeast. They didn’t have enough labor, sophisticated machinery, or capital to invest in new varieties to survive.

Meryl Streep testified in Congress against Alar, a substance used to treat McIntosh and Red Delicious apples, in 1989. (Screenshot via People)

All told, US McIntosh production has slipped from 19.1m bushels in 1982 to 11.7m bushels in 2013 to 5.2m bushels in 2023, falling from its spot at 2nd or 3rd in the US to 10th. Honeycrisps and Pink Cripps tripled in production from 2013 to 2023, and the Cosmic Crisp has gone up more than 20x since 2019.

In New York, where McIntoshes are still the most-produced apple, production has fallen from ~25% of the state’s total in the ‘80s to ~14% today.

Casey Darrow experienced the change in fortunes at his family business in Vermont, Green Mountain Orchards. At one point it had McIntosh apples on 90% of its 300 acres. Darrow says the orchard’s acreage has decreased by half, mirroring the state’s overall decline since 2000. On what remains, the Darrows have planted other apples, like Honeycrisp, and shifted business to direct sales at the orchard, away from grocers.

Overall, though, most of Green Mountain Orchards’ apple crop is still McIntosh, in part because replanting new varieties is expensive. Its decline on grocery store shelves has at least made the McIntosh more popular at the orchard, where Darrow sees nostalgic McIntosh fans seeking out the apple they picked with their grandparents.

But he can’t unload all his McIntoshes at the farmstand. And the McIntoshes he sells to packers, who sell them onward to wholesalers, go for ~$10 a bushel, roughly the same amount they fetched 20 years ago. Throw in complications with the cost and availability of labor, and it’s been harder than ever to make a profit.

“Every year,” Darrow says, “we say, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

A New Yorker grower pulls a McIntosh harvest in 2015. Production of McIntosh has fallen by nearly half since then. (John Carl D’Annibale/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)

Stevens, the Ontario farmer, had a hunch about Honeycrisps in 2000, when he struck up a conversation with a stranger who was praising the Honeycrisp on a visit to downtown Toronto. Twenty-five years later, ~80% of Wilmot Orchards’ apple crop is Honeycrisp, Gala, and Ambrosia.

Stevens estimates Ontario’s McIntosh production has gone from 60% of the entire apple crop in the late 20th century to closer to 10% today, a number that has fallen sharply since the late 2010s. His orchard is down to a single acre of McIntosh.

“I plan on living to at least 100,” says Stevens, who is 71. “And when I’m gone and all my friends are gone, the new generation will never know what a McIntosh is."

The fear of becoming a commodity

You’ve probably never heard of Susan Brown, a horticulture professor at Cornell University. But enough people have for her to receive fan mail. One time, she was out for dinner with her daughter and another restaurant patron recognized her.

“Somebody came over and said, ‘I heard you're one of the inventors of SnapDragon. Can I take my picture with you?’”

That level of enthusiasm is indicative of the popularity for the newer “club” apple varieties — and why, even if preferences shifted to tarter and softer apples, it would be nearly impossible for something like the McIntosh to mount a comeback.

As a club variety, the SnapDragon, which Brown co-invented with Kevin Maloney, doesn’t just offer a sophisticated taste (with a hint of vanilla). The club fees paid by growers go to marketing investments used for websites, TikToks, and ads, giving it wider appeal. The SnapDragon is the official apple of the Buffalo Bills, complete with a logo and a mascot named Snappy the Dragon.

The SnapDragon apple mascot. Sadly, there is no McIntosh mascot. (Snapdragonapple.com)

Club variety apples also usually require growers to meet a standard of quality and adhere to a production limit to avoid oversupply and declining prices — to avoid the dreaded leap into becoming a commodity, a routine, undifferentiated product.

“There’s a lot of apples that become commodities,” Brown says, like the Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and McIntosh. Even the Honeycrisp, which was not trademarked and is not a club variety, has started to become ubiquitous, bringing down prices.

Commodity apples don’t bring ideal returns for grocery stores, either. According to the trade publication Good Fruit Grower, stores with apples like the McIntosh, Red Delicious, and Gala representing a majority of their stock underperform compared to those stocking a majority of club apples like Jazz, Ambrosia, and SweeTango.

As for regular shoppers? Many have certainly enjoyed the wider varieties of apples with more complex tastes and personalities. But the higher costs make trips to the grocery store more expensive for middle-class Americans, who’ve sweated grocery prices as inflation sticks.

And then there are the old school devotees like Frank Johnson, who’d just like to bite into the soft flesh of a McIntosh.

Unable to find his favorite variety, Johnson sometimes opts for another traditional choice, the Granny Smith. But often, he just doesn’t buy apples.

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