Valued at more than half a billion dollars annually, Australia's apple industry is big business. Apple and Pear Australia Limited (APAL) chief executive Phil Turnbull said 300,000 tons of apples were grown each year across several different regions. He explained that Australia’s industry is trying to be innovative and bring new products to market.
According to Rowan Little, from grower Montague in Melbourne, there is a focus on the red-fleshed Kissabel apple. Ten years in the making, the plant material comes from France, where an old crab apple was crossed with a traditional eating apple.
"We think that the crab apple came from probably Kazakhstan, then they crossed it with a couple of varieties," Mr Little said, adding that there had been a lot of failures in the creation process with no genetic modification processes used.
"It's all just standard crossing, which means you take the pollen of one apple … and you pollinate the flowers on a different tree, and you do that in a very manual way using bees," he said. "Then you harvest the seeds from those crosses and that's the new variety.”
Mr Little said while the Kissabel wasn't currently available to buy from the local supermarket or greengrocer, the apples would be available at a small number of select stores.
Source: abc.net.au