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It was eight years ago when Barclay Crane personally planted 10 pilot trees in the soil of Quincy, WA with hopes of developing a premier apple. Today, as co-owner of Wenatchee, WA-based Pegasus Premier Fruit (along with Randy Steensman), Crane is seeing his Smitten apple reach big heights in the apple industry.
Randy Steensman
“Randy and I both have a lot of skin in this industry,” Crane says. “We had worked together about 18 years ago and reconnected with basically the same quest in mind—to find the best-tasting apple in the world and build a vertically integrated company out of it.”
Following a long history of collaboration with Plant and Food Research Ltd, the world-leading New Zealand breeding organization which produced Jazz, Pacific Rose and Envy, Crane set out to find an even superior apple ala Honeycrisp. Crane characterizes Smitten as the “Crown Jewel” of PFR’s brilliant history.
“It sounds like Don Quixote, but we found the apple,” he says. “This apple is in a class by itself. It has the crunch, extraordinary texture and taste that is out of this world – a blend of high natural sugars, rich complex aromatics and apple tang. It’s another bi-color apple, so it’s not about appearance, it’s 100 percent about the eating experience.”
Vailima Orchard
The Smitten is a blend of Gala, Braeburn, Fiesta, and Falstaff. Calling his young variety, “millennial friendly,” the Smitten is a naturally-colored, healthy, and flavorful apple, grown with efficient and environmentally friendly practices on naturally robust trees. It’s not GMO, hand-bred by traditional methods and exclusively grown by small- to medium-sized family growers.
Today, the company has nearly 100 acres of Smitten apples in the ground—the largest holding in the world of this variety. In addition to Washington-based growers making a commitment to grow Smitten apples, Pegasus Premier Fruit also has relationships with BelleHarvest Sales in Michigan, Lake Ontario Fruits/New York Apple Sales in New York, Algoma Orchards in Ontario and Vergers Paul Jodoin in Quebec.
“Washington has about 300 acres in production and that’s going to go up dramatically in the next couple of years,” Crane says. “We’re going to produce roughly 150,000 boxes this year and we expect to start doubling that every year before too long.”
Three of the supporting growers in Washington are growing organic and the company packed and sold approximately 25,000 boxes of organic apples this year. That’s about 15 percent of its total sales.
“It had an enormous response,” Crane says. “It’s a very obvious future of North American produce, driven by millennials.”
This September was the first organic crop and the majority of it was sold to chains that buy both conventional and organic. Customers also include major national organic wholesalers who are spreading the Smitten apples all over the country including organic “Mom and Pop” retailers.
“I think the percentage of organic will continue to increase as people take the plunge and eventually we will be around 50/50,” Crane says. “Our increase in acreage will progressively be a higher percentage of organic and three or four years from now, I see the variety being what the Honeycrisp was in 2010 with a lot of people being crazy about this.”
As veterans of the industry for more than 40 years each, Crane and Steensman put a great deal of effort in finding the perfect tasting apple and are thrilled they were able to accomplish their goal.
“This is a powerful product. This apple could be the most important item in an entire 40,000 sku supermarket, including a deli,” Crane says. “It will drive whole store sales, it will drive division sales and entire chain sales, and we have metrics that prove it will happen.”
