Per the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Honeycrisp apple was born at the University of Minnesota after decades of crossbreeding before being released to the public in 1991. According to Orange Pippen, the development of Honeycrisp was long and complex enough that the apples it was bred from needed to be rediscovered by a DNA test. Even then, the result showed one of its parents was an unnamed apple variety that has since been lost. All that work paid off though, as Vox explains that the Honeycrisp’s excellent snap is a result of breeding it to have larger cells, which burst with juices when ruptured. It’s a true feat of modern science and human determination that changed the apple market forever.
Despite its fantastic qualities as an apple, Honeycrisp was not an instant success. It took years before the larger public started regularly seeing it. Food & Wine notes that it is more delicate and expensive to cultivate than the tough, mass-produced apples like Red Delicious, which made the industry hesitant to adopt Honeycrisp. However, in the end, taste won out, as customers proved willing to pay a premium for an apple that was so much better than the less flavorful varieties they were used to. By the late 2010s, Honeycrisps were the fifth most popular apple in America, and other new apple varieties were piggybacking on its success.
