What Happened To The Supply Of Golden Delicious Apples?

"Out with the old in with the new" is an adage that can be applied to apple varieties too. If you find yourself wondering whatever happened to golden delicious apples, this is the answer in a nutshell but lets go a little deeper because there is more to it.

Thirty years ago, Golden Delicious apples were among the top three most popular apple varieties, along with Red Delicious and Gala apples. If you purchased apples at the grocery store, it was likely one of these three types. For good reason, too. Golden Delicious apples are among the best for baking, and they're also great for eating, with a soft flesh and sweet, honey-like flavor. 

Fast-forward. IN 2024, USApple predicts the top three most popular apple varieties for 2024-2025 season. Gala, Red Delicious, and Granny Smith. Where is Golden Delicious on this list? Those sweet golden apples are buried under Fuji and Honeycrisp. You may even find Pink Lady or Rome apples before scoring a Golden Delicious at the grocery store these days.

A large part of that is due to supply and demand. With all the apple varieties out there, stores will stock what sells, and if people are buying Red Delicious and Gala, that's what they'll put in the store.

Another reason for the decline in Golden Delicious apples ties back to the popularity, but it's a bit more technical. Commercial apple orchards replant their trees every 15-30 years.So once an orchard of Golden Delicious apples hit the end of that life cycle and another variety of apples was more popular, easier to grow, or would bring in more profit than what was already growing there, the grower is likely going to switch to the variety that is more lucrative for them.

Apples are also not self-pollinating. So in order for apple trees to produce, they must be pollinated by another variety of apple tree. This means that even if an orchard is considered to be a Golden Delicious orchard, there will be other varieties of apples growing in the orchard in order for the crop to get pollinated.

When seeds from a Golden Delicious (or any other variety of apple, for that matter) are planted, the resulting apple tree probably won't produce the same variety of apples that it came from. Instead, the resulting fruit may or may not be as desirable as the apple that came from the parent tree.

That's why Golden Delicious apples were everywhere 30 years ago and are now a bit of a rarity. Other factors that may have swayed farmers to swap them out for something else are storage issues. Golden Delicious apples bruise easily when stored for long periods of time. They are also not as crispy and sweet as some of the newer varieties of apples that are available now.