An Ohio Breeding Program Strives to Create The Next Great Apple

Two apples were placed on a table at a Midwest Apple Improvement Association board meeting in January of 2009. One, a GoldRush, looked like a mummy, Bill Dodd remembers — brown, rotten, bad.

The other looked like a typical apple, red and crisp. Its name: EverCrisp.

Both of the apples were picked at the end of October in Indiana, explained their grower, David Doud. He told the fellow board members that he had stored them on his kitchen counter, unrefrigerated, for three months. EverCrisp immediately won over the room.

“Everybody at the table said, ‘How soon can I get some trees?’” Dodd remembers. “That was the moment.”

EverCrisp, a cross between Honeycrisp and Fuji, is the star of MAIA, the apple breeding organization that started in the late 1990s in Ohio. Trees have been patented,