Produce Retailer Blog

Oh, yeah, it’s my teeth grinding together.

I just caught an episode of ABC’s new show Once Upon a Time. This episode, the second of the series, features the evil queen/town mayor/antagonist holding a basket of apples for the protagonist.

click image to zoomABCYeah, that's so not a basket of Honeycrisp. And I'm not the only person who noticed the glaring error. And she says this:

“Did you know the honeycrisp tree is the most vigorous and hardy of all apple trees?  It can survive temperatures as cold as 40 below and keep growing.  It can weather any storm.  I have one I’ve tended to since I was a little girl. And to this day, I’ve yet to taste anything more delicious than the fruit it offers.”

Wow, that’s a great ad for Honeycrisp apples right?

It’d be better if that wasn’t a big ol’ basket of RED DELICIOUS.

Sure, for decades the red delicious variety has been the icon of evil witch poison apple fame. There’s no denying its deep red skin is appealing for artistic types. Bright, shiny red apples = evil witch poison, apparently.

But please, set designer type folks, pay attention to what you’re talking about. Honeycrisp is a very popular variety with consumers right now, so I understand why the writers decided to use that blurb.

But it totally doesn’t fit with the apple they chose and it’s not just the produce industry types that have noticed.

I sent a screen capture of the scene to Chris Sandwick, a salesman for Pepin Heights Orchard, “The HoneyCrisp Place” and he fired back a few links of other people griping about the mistake here and here.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love it when produce is visible and love it when characters in movies or television talk about my favorite fruits or vegetables.

I remember being giddy when I could see several recognizable brands of fresh produce, including Cuties clementines, Tropic Moon grapefruit  and Nature’s Partner avocados, in a cooler in season 2 of HBO’s TrueBlood.  I even contacted the show’s set designer to find out why they picked those particular brands and they said it was coincidence.

Well, I guess the Honeycrisp crowd can enjoy the words and the red delicious crowd can enjoy the pictures, because there’s no such thing as bad press, right?