Can the Cosmic Crisp apple live up to huge expectations?

So how does the Cosmic Crisp stack up against its competitors? We decided to try it out ourselves—for journalism!—and we orchestrated a blind taste test to answer the two big, overarching questions. First: Is it delicious? And, perhaps more importantly, is it delicious enough? 

Despite the hype, or perhaps because of it, it was remarkably difficult to get our hands on a box of Cosmic Crisps this week. Part of the problem was that our newsroom is located in New York City—the apples are widely available on the West Coast and at Kroger stores nationwide, but most East Coasters need to be patient. We called the marketing agency, a handful of grocery stores, the university, and individual farmers. No dice. 

Finally, our reporter Jessica Fu enlisted her Seattle-based sister to head to the grocery store and buy some Cosmics on our behalf. They were advertised for $2 a pound, less than Eater and Business Insider reported but more than the national average for all apples. She overnighted them to New York City, and we arranged a blind taste test. We wanted to put the Cosmic Crisps up against a few farmers’ market varieties and a couple from the grocery stores. May the best apple win. 

We chose to test the Cosmic alongside its parent breed, the Honeycrisp, as well as the trademarked Pink Lady and the Fuji, a popular Japanese hybrid. I added two Red Delicious apples to the mix—one from the farmers’ market and one from Whole Foods—to see whether there was a difference based on provenance, and also to test whether my esteemed colleagues would realize two of the apples were the same. (They did, sort of.) I then threw in a grocery store Granny Smith and a new-to-me apple called an Evercrisp, a mix between a Honeycrisp and a Fuji that was released in October 2017. I paid between $1.85 and $2.85 per pound for the apples purchased in New York City.

On Thursday, five of us tested the eight apples in a dimly lit conference room at our coworking space. I asked people to fill out a form rating each apple from 1 to 5 in categories including taste, texture, and appearance, and I also asked them to write down tasting notes for each fruit. At the end of the tasting, my colleagues ranked the apples, best to worst, and responded to one final question: Would you pay extra for any of these fruits? 

Shockingly, every single person had the same favorite apple. And besides me, everyone agreed on their least favorite apple, too. For the most part, we ranked roughly the same four apples in the top and roughly the same four apples in the bottom. 

Unfortunately for Washingtonians, the smash hit was the Pink Lady, that Australian cross between a Golden Delicious and a Lady Williams. The Fuji and the Evercrisp were also popular. The abject failure was the store-bought Red Delicious, which was also the only Organic apple of the bunch. 

All told, Cosmic Crisp fell solidly in the middle of the pack. One colleague wrote “sugary—big hit—then there’s nothing.” Another wrote “not too crisp or mealy.” Another just wrote “standard.” It did find one fan, who said that it was “nearly perfect” with a “great satisfying crispy snap.” 

Generally speaking, the Cosmic Crisp outperformed the grocery store standbys: It beat the Red Delicious, the Granny Smith, and even outranked its parent, the Honeycrisp, for many tasters. It also scored high in the “looks” category, winning a perfect score from two of our staffers. All of my colleagues said they would pay extra for a very good apple, but none of them flagged the Cosmic Crisp as a premium product. 

Our conclusion: It’s a good apple. Even a very good apple, compared to the mass-market varieties it’s aiming to unseat. It’s not going to out-compete the lovely Pink Lady, which had our entire newsroom swooning, but it’s not designed to do that. This is a workhorse apple, meant to be affordable for farmers and pleasing for eaters, and to last for a year on the shelf while staying crispy. As for whether or not the Cosmic Crisp is worth a 30 percent price premium? A Crisp in a sea of sour Grannies is different from a Crisp nestled among freshly picked farmers’ market novelties. In other words, we might buy it at the grocery store, but it’s not likely to keep us from our annual apple-picking trip.

Speaking of shelf life, we noticed one other thing during our taste test. Over the course of the hour or so it took us to finish our tasting, most of the sliced apples turned brown and slimy. By the time we left the conference room, just one apple showed few signs of discoloration: The Cosmic Crisp. 

I left a sliced Cosmic on my desk for the rest of the day, curious to see how long the slime would hold off. By 5:30, three hours after our test, it still showed just a hint of brown. Then we ate it.