On a chilly December morning as I wandered among a sea of other shoppers in the produce aisle of my local Whole Foods, a pyramid of larger-than-average, deep-red apples caught my eye. The sign next to them read "Cosmic Crisp." I gasped: I had been waiting months to try these apples. I called over to my wife and began dropping armfuls of apples into our shopping cart. Yet customers around me continued sifting through the Granny Smiths and the Galas, unaware that something special lay between them.
No one else in the store seemed to know the amount of work and money it took to make these apples a reality. They took 20 years and tens of millions of dollars to produce, and then they launched with a $10 million marketing budget. Was it all worth it? Read on to learn more about this specifically engineered apple.