Arctic apples are genetically altered to suppress browning and may be offered for sale as bagged slices in up to 400 stores in the Midwest and Southern California without a GMO label, according to the company.
The modified Golden Delicious apples were developed by Okanagan Specialty Fruits, a privately owned company acquired for $41 million in 2015 by the Maryland biotech Intrexon. Other divisions of that company are already marketing genetically modified salmon, cloned cattle, and self-destructing mosquitoes.
The company plans to sell the apples as bags of pre-sliced fruit but say they will not be labelled as “produced with genetic engineering” and will not come with any other packaging identifying them as GMOs. Instead, as allowed under a 2016 labeling law, there will be a QR code that links to a Web page with detailed information on how the apples were made.
“We didn’t want put ‘GMO’ and a skull and crossbones on the package,” Neal Carter, Okanagan’s founder, said this week, during a presentation in San Francisco.
Source: geneticliteracyproject.org
