How about them ‘Sunpunch’ apples?

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[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current podcast. [apple crunches] You know what that is? That's the sound of fall, somebody biting to a, into a crisp, crunchy apple. This is apple season, and creating a new apple can take fruit breeders decades to perfect. After 25 years of experimenting, we have a lot of apples that you could get, but there are new apples on the horizon. And after 25 years of experimenting, Canadian scientists think that they have managed to figure out something new for your fruit plate. Move over Honeycrisp and Pink Lady. Welcome the SunPunch. Amritpal Singh is a scientist at the federally funded Summerland Research and Development Centre of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in British Columbia, and also part of the team that created the SunPunch apple. Amritpal, good morning.

Hi. Good morning, Matt. [laughs]

Tell me, tell me about the apple. What does it taste like?

Uh, Sunch- SunPunch, uh, is an amazing apple. It tastes like it looks. Um, it has, uh, uh, a nice bright appearance, and it is quite dense in its texture, and it has unique, uh, storability. Like, uh, anything on, in the market does not have excellent storability like, uh, SunPunch yet. And, uh, it maintains its texture and flavor, uh, during the storage as well.

Tell me more about the flavor. If I bite into it, what, what am I gonna taste?

Uh, yeah, it has, uh, uh, a nice fruit, apple-like flavor. Uh, often, uh, people often describe it also as tropical flavors.

Oh.

And, um-

Does it com- does it compare to other apples that are out there? If people are, are chewing on a Honeycrisp right now, is it, is it similar, different than that, or a McIntosh, or?

So compared to Honeycrisp, uh, SunPunch has a dense texture, and, uh, it is more flavorful, and it maintains that texture, uh, during the storage. And even if you leave it on a shelf for several days-

Mm

... it will still taste, uh, crisp, juicy, and, um, uh, demonstrate an excellent, uh, flavor.

So tell me how one goes about making a new apple variety. What is... This, this is a long process. Uh, w- how does that work?

Yes, Matt, you're right. Uh, tree fruit breeding is a very long-term activity. From the day we make a cross to the day we are able to release a new variety, there is a time difference of more than 20 years.

Wow.

It all begins with making or choosing the parents for making these hybrids. We make a cross and then generate a population of seedlings, and these seedlings are like brothers and sisters from same set of parents. They resemble each other and the parents, but they are not an identical copy of each other. The idea is to identify the best of the best from