One of a kind

Mom always knew that apples were good for you. New research and development is showing us how and why

It was called Minnesota 1711 when it was first grown from a graft at the University of Minnesota three decades ago. When released to the commercial marketplace in 1991, the apple was given the more commercial name Honeycrisp. Prized for its combination of tartness, firmness, and brilliant red skin, the Honeycrisp became an instant hit in the fickle North American fresh-fruit market. Farmers around the world—in China, France, Chile, New Zealand, and Washington state—wasted no time planting Honeycrisp cultivars en masse.

Nova Scotian farmers quickly followed suit, but they have had a competitive advantage from the start—an advantage so beneficial that the Honeycrisp is quickly becoming known as Nova Scotia's brand of apple, according to Dela Erith, the executive director of the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers Association (NSFGA). "Nova Scotia's climate is the perfect climate to grow the apple in," she says. "The combination of our cool fall nights and warm fall days causes it to develop that incredible iridescent colour that it is so well known for. It's an awesome product. Consumers love it."

In fact, Annapolis Valley farmers have always had a competitive advantage when it comes to apple-growing conditions. Blessed with the deepest, richest soil and the warmest, sunniest microclimate in Nova Scotia, the valley is a regional breadbasket, producing all manner of cash crops but particularly the brilliant red apple varieties that grow here better than almost anywhere else. Here the apple is king—celebrated with the annual Apple Blossom Festival in late May, advertised on myriad fruit-stand signs, enshrined in the local culture and cuisine.

Annapolis Valley farmers grow 50 varieties of apples, including McIntosh, Red Delicious, Cortland, Spartan, Gravenstein, and Northern Spy. At one time, farmers here squeezed twice as many apples off a tree as the global average, but the world is catching up, and today Nova Scotian trees only yield 22% more apples than the average around the world. The province sells 35,000 metric tonnes of apples every year, worth about
$50 million to the Nova Scotia economy, making it the only province in Canada to have a net export of the fruit. Customers include the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Despite a thriving export business, more than half of the apples grown in Nova Scotian orchards find their way into the province's fruit-processing industry. It's a prosperous business but not exactly diverse, says Erith. Apple processing in Nova Scotia is concentrated on just two areas: juice and pies. In 2001 the NSFGA took a huge step to change that narrow focus, establishing a program with several industry partners to develop new apple–based products for the local industry. "The program is unique in the country, and it's working," says Erith. "We're proud of it."

The first thing the NSFGA (www.nsapples.com) did was collaborate with the Nova Scotia Agricultural College (www.nsac.ca) to hire Dr. Vasantha Rupasinghe. An assistant professor and tree fruit bio-product research chair at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, Rupasinghe is a leading expert on the apple and its molecular properties. "He's the real star of our program," says Erith. Rupasinghe set to work designing new products for the local apple industry.

The apple's ace in the hole, says Rupasinghe, is something that most of us have known anecdotally since we were children: Apples are good for us. They have been branded in the human consciousness as a health food for thousands of years, and it is a reputation that is well deserved. The ancient fruit is one of the world's most popular and potent "nutraceuticals," a term the food-science community uses to refer to foods with proven health benefits. The antioxidants contained in apples are the same ones found in berries, artichokes, green tea, and dark chocolate. Scientific evidence shows that these natural compounds are good for the cardiovascular system, reduce the symptoms of diseases such as diabetes and asthma, and, most encouragingly, potentially slow or even prevent the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Rupasinghe is a busy man; his team is working with 28 apple genotypes to identify the ones that have the most disease-fighting compounds, with the ultimate goal of producing a healthy "super apple"—one that can be marketed to health-conscious consumers around the world. At the same time he wants to make the apple more consumer friendly, so he is trying to identify and develop specialty cultivars for value-added processing such as "fresh cuts." Studies are underway to find natural ways to increase the shelf life of fresh-cut apple slices and to prevent them from browning too quickly by using health-friendly preservatives derived from plants such as cinnamon.

Rupasinghe is also developing healthy snack foods such as apple chips and finding ways to extract the health benefits of apples and place them into other food products—part of a growing food-industry trend that started a few years ago with omega-3 fatty acids. "The trend is to incorporate the right ingredients in the right amount for health and well-being into things like milk, bread, and the other foods we eat on a regular basis," says Rupasinghe. "Once we thought we would do it with pills, but consumers don't want it that way. Now we are interested in finding ways to blend or mix bioactive antioxidants into what we regularly eat that would make a great value-added product."

Another way to deliver healthy foods with minimum effort is to create what Rupasinghe calls "healthy convenience food," or flavourful snack foods that satisfy cravings but also score high in vitamin, fibre, and antioxidant content. "A lot of people are struggling to eat five to 10 servings of vegetables a day," he says. "It would be a lot easier if they could get healthy vegetable-based snack foods." His research will facilitate the introduction of a healthy snack-food product, "oil-free" apple chips, soon.

Some of those snacks and food ingredients will come from apple peels. Now just a waste product of the apple-processing industry, more than one million kilograms of peelings, which are packed with antioxidants, end up in landfills or composting facilities every year. "If we can find ways to use the peelings that are discarded from apple processing," says Rupasinghe, "we can convert a huge amount of that unused biomass into nutraceuticals."

Despite the impressive science, taste is still the bottom line when it comes to the popularity of apples or apple-based ingredients. "Consumer attitudes are changing," says Rupasinghe. "The last generation liked the McIntosh and that kind of a taste. The new generation is going for the Honeycrisps and Royal Galas. It's a big change in demography. We need to constantly upgrade our cultivars to meet the demand of consumers who are asking for a different taste. That's a big challenge."

Hanspeter Stutz is benefiting from Rupasinghe's program. Stutz is one of the few apple processors in the Annapolis Valley who doesn't produce either juice or pies from the fruit. In 1993 Stutz, an immigrant from Switzerland, fulfilled a lifelong dream when he purchased a foundering winery in Grand Pré, on the eastern end of the Annapolis Valley. He chose Nova Scotia because wineries in his native Europe are nearly impossible to buy (most have been owned by families for centuries, and agricultural land in Europe is astronomically expensive).

After buying Domaine de Grand Pré (www.grandprewines.ns.ca), Stutz wasted no time establishing a catalogue of award-winning vintages, including New York Muscat, Seyval Blanc, L'Acadie Blanc, Marechal Foch, and Vidal Icewine, selling them under his Domaine de Grand Pré label. Stutz established a level of quality early on, injecting a European sensibility into the fledgling wine industry of his adopted province.

But along with grapes grown from European stock on his own valley land, Stutz turned his sights to the Annapolis Valley's ubiquitous signature product. His first flirtation with the apple came in the form of Grand Pré's Pomme d'Or, a sweet apple dessert wine that get its complex caramel colour and baked-apple flavour from Spy, Ida Red, and McIntosh apples and its golden colour from Golden Russets. It has been garnering a lot of attention recently, particularly in the hard-to-impress wine regions of France and Germany. "It's unbelievable to me that there are old apple regions in Europe that don't have a product like this," says Stutz.

In 2001 he tried something even more radical: a hard apple cider product targeting the trendy cooler market. It was a huge gamble. Traditionally thought of as a low-class alcoholic beverage, cider doesn't quite fit the profile of other designer coolers. But then again, Stutz Hard Apple Cider is a long way from the syrupy liquid sold in plastic jugs at roadside stands. Stutz's cider is made from 100% apples and is flavourful and light, with an alcohol content of 4.5%, purposefully brewed in order to compete with light beers and coolers. "People are so surprised about the quality," says Stutz. "When I took it
to Germany everyone said, 'We love the quality of this product. We love your packaging. We want to have your cider.' " In
two or three years, Stutz plans to be exporting 1 million litres of cider annually.

"I'm bringing the apple to another level," says Stutz, throwing out a new tag line he's thinking of using in his advertising. "It's not enough just to make, say, 10 million litres of juice or produce 100,000 apple pies a day. We can do much more with apples. That's my philosophy." Now he's setting his sights on the next value-added apple product in his arsenal. He plans to open a distillery, a rarity in eastern Canada, to make fine Gravenstein apple and pear schnapps using valley products exclusively. In the same building, he is finalizing plans for a high-end vinegar-production operation and is looking into the feasibility of developing an athletic power drink to go head-to-head with such giants as Gatorade. "My idea is to use Atlantic Canadian fruits—the apple, the blueberry, the cranberry, the rosehip—to produce a high-end power drink."

Diversifying his own product base is more than just good business for Stutz. He says the apple industry in Nova Scotia must diversify and add value if it is to survive the coming onslaught of such giant fruit producers as China. Farmers also need incentives to stop the destructive process of cutting down and replacing apple trees just because the fruit has gone out of fashion. "What happens is that everyone in the world starts growing the trendy apples, and price goes down," he says. "The farmer loses in the end. The Honeycrisp is a great apple, but I need Gravensteins, I need McIntoshs. If I give farmers a market for those varieties and give them a good price for them, they will have the incentive to keep growing them."

Adding value to the lowly apple is not always necessary. In some parts of the world, apples are considered a delicacy, and affluent people are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of sinking their teeth into one. And there are few places on Earth with as many affluent people as the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The NSFGA has come up with an unusual way to get its fresh Honeycrisp apples on supermarket shelves in Dubai City. The organization has partnered with EduNova, (www.edunova.ca) the education co-operative that markets Nova Scotia education and training around the world. Education is a precious commodity in the UAE, and many residents send their children to Nova Scotian universities. Now EduNova and NSFGA have found a way to market Nova Scotian apples and education at the same time.

Whether it is as a symbolic gift for a teacher or a metaphor for a good idea, apples have had a long association with education. The EduNova campaign is encapsulated in
a poster featuring a photo of a shiny Honeycrisp apple. The tag line, in Arabic, asks, "What can a Nova Scotia apple teach us?" Superimposed on the apple is the formula for photosynthesis. The sales pitch at the bottom of the poster promotes Nova Scotia's education-and-training sector to its Arabic-speaking audience. The campaign will increase awareness of Nova Scotia apples in the Middle East and help pave the way for an appearance by the NSFGA at a giant Persian Gulf food show later this year. "This is a great opportunity to leverage the awareness of Nova Scotian education and training into an awareness for Nova Scotian apples," says Ava Czapalay, EduNova's president and CEO.

"The apple industry in Nova Scotia needs to be patted on the back," says Erith. "It has managed to be a leader in the industry for a long time by coming up with new markets and new ideas. The apple industry isn't a dull industry. It's exciting and innovative." And considering all of the changes that are currently taking place, it's likely to stay that way for at least another century.
— Tom Mason

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