The Minnesota Grown Apple: From The Orchard to Your Mouth

Minnesota apples are delicious. As far as fruits go, you could make an argument for apples to be on the Top 3 list of the best, all-around, fruits on the planet. At a minimum, they’re a Top 5 fruit.

They’re a great source of many healthy things your body needs, including the fiber (my fellow older folks just nodded their head on that one). Just search the benefits of apples and you are going to find a very long list of websites that will tell you how they do benefit us as well as the ways they suspect they do. It’s pretty impressive.

I have a couple of friends who have “mini-orchards”. Occasionally, I get a few, fresh, Minnesota grown apples come my way. I’m sure my friends spend at least a few hours, during the weekend, gathering those up. But when I stop and think about the big apple orchard farms, and I’m talking a massive amount of apple trees, I wonder what the process is like.  How exactly do all those apples make it to our stores? And how long does it take?

It turns out, not that long. WCCO/CBS did a story on the process of apples going from the orchard to me taking a bite of one. Every apple is hand-picked. You would have to right? It would take a really intelligent machine to know which to pull and keep, and which to toss. I have no doubt that technology will exist someday, but it isn’t today.

After they’re picked they are sent to the packing facility where they are cleaned, packed, and shipped. They can arrive as soon as the next morning. That’s as close to picking them yourself as you can get.

Oh, one more thing. If they’re the famous Minnesota Honeycrisp apples, don’t expect them to last long in the store.

To see a more in-depth look at the process, watch the video from WCCO/CBS.