YOUR INDUSTRY
Next Generation Apples managing director, Evan Heywood, amongst two-year-old Sassy apple trees in the Motueka Valley
Sassy new apple variety packs a punch Coming up with a short, punchy, easy-to-pronounce name for a new apple variety to trademark has become just as challenging as producing a new apple, but Next Generation Apples has done it with Sassy™. Anne Hardie The conical shape of the new apple with its high colour, crunch factor and sweet flavour are its marketable attributes but Next Generation Apples managing director, Evan Heywood, says its early harvest window offers a real opportunity to crack into a market saturated with new varieties. Next Generation Apples is a joint venture between two multigenerational apple companies – Tasman-based Golden Bay Fruit and Hawke’s Bay-based Taylor Corp – which teamed up to get the scale they needed to take on new varieties. Evan says the joint venture was an opportunity for likeminded, intergenerational growers to work together to take that next step and compete for new varieties they could trademark and take to the world. 16
The ORCHARDIST : FEBRUARY 2022
In 2019, the company won the Prevar tender to licence the new varieties T093 and T003, with the commitment to put trees in the ground in New Zealand and also offshore. The result is two-year-old trees in Tasman and Hawke’s Bay with their third leaf and a small crop for 2022. Finding the right name that could put the apple on the map has perhaps been the most challenging part of the journey. “In the past five years the landscape has changed for finding a name. You want to protect intellectual property of both the apple and the trademark so people can’t copy it or plant trees illegally. Evans says the other variety, T003, a Honeycrisp and Sciros cross, is a more elegant and exciting apple but to date, they have had no luck with securing a suitable name.
