A basket of new fruit varieties is coming your way

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/03/04/a-basket-of-new-fruit-varieties-is-coming-your-way

by vinni2 • 5 months ago

49 58 5 months ago

Cider9986• 5 months ago

The improvements in fruit over the years has improved my quality of life so much. If you have never tried a sumo citrus, I recommend it -- they are only in season till April iirc.

Benefits of sumo citrus: Easy to peel Pith does not remain attached to orange Super juicy Excellent taste and texture, balanced acid and sugar levels.

https://archive.is/wBogT

HerbManic• 5 months ago

It is always a good time of year then they come along. I have had WAY too many of them but thats not going to stop me from having many more.

fanatic2pope• 5 months ago

Funny enough I was eating a Sumo as I came across your comment. They are certainly very tasty, but for the price (which is high at least here in Ohio) I much prefer the tartness of a traditional in-season California satsuma.

throwup238• 5 months ago

All the California satsumas I can find here in California have all converged on the dekopon/Sumo taste and form. It’s confusing because the satsumas on Google images are still mostly the round ones without the bumps.

The prices vary wildly. At the end of the season I can find them in some ethnic grocers for $0.33 a pound while right now they’re $1.50-2 a pound. When they were first coming out years ago they were $4 a piece at Trader Joes.

hinkley7• 5 months ago

I highly recommend trying a cold Sumo. Refrigerated sumos are a bit of an aranciata vibe.

Sumos are bright and brightly flavored fruit often have a better experience when chilled.

waldothedog• 5 months ago

Like sumo, but love minneola!

bitshiftfaced4• 5 months ago

Similarly, the Tango variety is becoming more commercially available. It has a zipper peel, seedless, and outstanding flavor. It's usually marketed as "Mandarin", though. You kind of have to know what it looks like to be able to tell what's a clementine or not.

Others to watch out for are Gold Nugget (my favorite, but I very rarely see them at the store), and I also saw Kishu at the grocery store for the first time this year.

pinkmuffinere• 5 months ago

I love fruits and vegetables, and am excited about this! That said, I do worry long-term about changes to increase sugar content. Sure it’s delicious, but I think it’s almost strictly worse for me. If only the high-sugar items sell, it will become harder to find low-sugar items. Not to mention the amount of self-control that will be required.

leptons2• 5 months ago

One thing I love about low-sugar citrus is the ability for it to not spike my sugar levels.

I use Miracle Fruit extract which alters the taste buds temporarily to turn sour flavors into sweet flavors. I can eat an entire lime and it tastes like sweet candy, with no real sugar content. No artificial sweetening either.

vscode-rest• 5 months ago

I worry for your enamel.

prewett• 5 months ago

I wish they'd sell old varieties of apples. The new ones all insist of having Red Delicious (so called) as part of the genetic makeup. It does not impart a good flavor. There are all these nice old ones, like Cortland and Winesap, but you can't get them anywhere.

Tomte• 5 months ago

I love Boskoop, and they are thankfully still all over German supermarkets. If not, Holstein Cox will do, and if they have it, Elstar.

The real good ones, like Berlepsch, are hard to find here, though, unless you travel to a plantation.

black_puppydog• 5 months ago

+1 on Boskoop. But also Cox Orange and James Grief

FinnKuhn• 5 months ago

Also love Boskoop, but I feel like they can be more difficult to find than other Apples in German supermarkets.

Any other Apple variety just feels not nearly as juice and regularly too sweet for my taste - especially when you want to use them for baking.

dodger-dog• 5 months ago

Have you ever even Honey-Crisped, Bro?

simojo• 5 months ago

Not if you have a local amish plug

IncreasePosts• 5 months ago

Cosmic crisp seems very commonly available(at least, here in colorado) and has a great taste and texture with no red delicious genes present

hinkley7• 5 months ago

Honeycrisp is still a grandchild of golden delicious, though as it turns out not the one the university intended. They claimed it was Macoun and Honeygold but it was a different one of their test experiments after genetic testing.

grosswait• 5 months ago

I’d like to see a citation - I’m not sure this Red Delicious assertion is true.

smashed• 5 months ago

Depends on where you are maybe? Cortland is still readily available here (Quebec). Hope it stays that way, I'm feeling slightly worried. Seems like the trend of trademarked new apple varieties has not quite caught up here yet as orchards are not interested in replacing tried and true stocks.

ghaff• 5 months ago

Yeah, I think my neighbor has a few Cortland trees in New England. Lots of Mcintoshes which aren't great for cooking but generally good for eating. Apples are probably about the last thing I'd say you couldn't get varieties of.

ac29• 5 months ago

There's an apple orchard that sells at the farmers market in my city with >40 seasonal varieties, most of which you'd never see at a supermarket. Apples grow well in a lot of the US, its worth looking for local options

kpil• 5 months ago

In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.

Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.

Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.

jaapz• 5 months ago

Another reason I think is that not all of these varieties thrive as small trees, and most factory farmed trees are kept small because it makes picking them easier.

whycome• 5 months ago

I always feel personally attacked when people bad-mouth (ha) the Red Delicious. It's true that many are this mealy disaster -- but I think that's a product of crappy long cellar times and trying to get money for 'old' apples. If you get a good fresh one, it should be the right level of tart, sweet, crisp, and juicy. And when they are good, they are probably my favorite. It's just so damn hard to get the good ones and no great ways to tell if they're good before biting in.

SauntSolaire2• 5 months ago

I've picked them straight from the tree and they still end up a mealy disaster. But hey, maybe I'm just bad at picking 'em.

hinkley7• 5 months ago

Because golden delicious and red delicious were everywhere in the 90's and spontaneous hybridization is a very, very low success rate.

Ambrosia apples appear to be a spontaneous cross of grandchildren of Golden and Red delicious apples.

sublinear• 5 months ago

I don't really care if my food is GMO as much as I worry about nutrient content being reduced to cut costs.

What is the incentive here?

I don't want to live in a world where fruit is bastardized into candy, meat is missing amino acids in the protein, and everyone has fucking diabetes as a result and dies at 40.

We don't even need gene editing to have seen this game played before. It happened throughout the previous century. Look at the history of iceberg lettuce and other watery slop like cheap tomatoes.

detourdog• 5 months ago

My GMO concerns are all centered around the vulnerability of monoculture crops. Having a variety seems to make the food supply more resilient.

hinkley7• 5 months ago

There's some compelling reasoning that dwarfism to maximize produce size has contributed substantially to the reduction in nutrients.

Because when the tree fruits, it pulls nutrients out of the rest of the plant. And if there's less plant, then you get produce that's more water and carbon and less nutrient.

passwordoops• 5 months ago

Faced with a full-length pop-up saying they care about my privacy just made me think, "if you cared about my privacy, you wouldn't track me and therefore wouldn't need ny consent for anything"

Cpoll2• 5 months ago

They bury the "Reject" button behind two clicks too.

mmooss• 5 months ago

The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.

Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.

Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. ... As Pairwise’s blackberries and cherries show, advances in gene editing are allowing fruits to be altered in new ways. crispr, the most popular such technique at the moment ...
The European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones. That seems an appropriately fruitful approach.

But there is this interesting tidbit, purely from the money-making perspective:

... unlike existing genetically modified crops, those made using crispr do not require dna from a foreign organism to be inserted—a practice that experience shows puts customers off.

linkregister• 5 months ago

Your comment presupposes the benefits of GMO agriculture are outweighed by the costs. If we make assertions, we should back them up.

gruez• 5 months ago

Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.

Should every article about vaccines also include a disclaimer about how some people think they cause autism?

themafia• 5 months ago

If your goal is to help allay the fears of people who hold that view, then obviously, yes!

If your goal is constantly punch down and find a class of people you're "allowed" to bully for thinking differently, then by all means, proceed as you have.

azan_• 5 months ago

The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.

And you also did not raise any issue, just asserted that there are some. GMO is amazing.

blacksmith_tb• 5 months ago

I could agree to a point, the most commonly planted GMO crops are Roundup-Ready grains and soy, which encourage spraying even more atrazine on fields[1]. That does of course also mean increased yields, but the tradeoff is not unambiguously good. However the varieties discussed in this article clearly don't have that problem, knocking out genes to emphasize desirable characteristics seems much more appealing, though I suppose I'd rather see increasing nutrient density over making seeds less chewy, even if that meant adding DNA from other plants[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_tomato#Biotechnology

comrade1234• 5 months ago

Glad I live where growing this unnecessary genetically engineered shit is illegal. Patents on food shouldn't exist.

Cpoll2• 5 months ago

Plant patents predate GMOs. If you cross-pollinate or graft into a new cultivar, you can patent it.

Here's a climbing rose patent from 1930: https://patents.google.com/patent/USPP1P/en

Hammershaft• 5 months ago

What makes this 'shit' for you compared to the fruits we've conventionally engineered into unnatural forms via selective breeding?

deepriverfish2• 5 months ago

one thing I don't like about fruits nowadays is that they're too sweet, I don't remember grape being so sweets when I was younger for example, it's like eating sugary water.

OutOfHere• 5 months ago

They're a disaster. I have had to stop eating bananas and grapes for this reason. Also, taking the seeds out of grapes makes them much less healthy.

jemmyw• 5 months ago

I thought bananas have been the same variety for a very long time now?

liveoneggs2• 5 months ago

have you had those cotton candy grapes?

deepriverfish2• 5 months ago

no, but judging by the name I take they're super sweet?

rngfnby• 5 months ago

Label the fruit as a gmo and the market for them collapses. Which is why we're not allowed to have clear stickers at the store.

hinkley7• 5 months ago

New cultivars are kinda screwing up classic canning recipes because a common change is more neutral pH, which makes them more susceptible to decay organisms.

Honeycrisps and red Fuji are pretty high.

bitshiftfaced4• 5 months ago

I have no doubt that blackberries will go this direction because it's annoying to get seeds stuck in your teeth. On the other hand, compare the fiber of blackberries (8g in one cup) to modern grapes (1g in one cup).

A basket of new fruit varieties is coming your way

Related Stories